The Emerging Church: Religion at the Margins 9781935049760

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THE EMERGING CHURCH

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Religion in Politics and Society: Dynamics and Developments Series editor, Daniel H. Levine

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THE EMERGING CHURCH Religion at the Margins

Josh Packard

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Published in the United States of America in 2012 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.firstforumpress.com and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2012 by FirstForumPress. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-1-935049-50-0 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This book was produced from digital files prepared by the author using the FirstForumComposer. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Tables Acknowledgments

vii ix

1

Resisting Success

1

2

Developing Hyperlocal Congregations

33

3

Sustaining Permanently Unsettled Lives

61

4

Getting Things Done

85

5

The Appeal of the Emerging Church

123

6

Sustaining Faith, Sustaining Resistance

145

Appendix A: Research Method and Design Appendix B: Interview Guide Appendix C: Emerging Church Texts Appendix D: The Anti-Statement of Faith Bibliography Index

v

171 177 181 183 187 197

Tables

Table 1.1: Worship Elements

15

Table 1.2: Interviewee List

19

Table 1.3: Congregational Characteristics

21

Table 1.4: Written Statements of Faith

22

Table 6.1: Organizational Forms

166

vii

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have an academic mentor who is both rigorous and supportive. Dr. Richard Pitt has been a champion of this project from the start. At times when I questioned the direction, utility or merit of the research, he was quick to point out the value of the project and encourage me. When, on the other hand, I felt like I’d had the greatest insight in the discipline in the last 50 years, he was just as firmly, and rightly, dismissive. His guidance has not only aided this particular project, but has also helped me to develop a model that will be a guide for me in the future as a researcher and advisor. Additionally, Dr. Karen Campbell has been an exceptional mentor throughout this process. Her ability to pay attention to detail and keep the larger picture in mind is a skill that I will forever be trying to hone. I would like to thank my friends and family for their unwavering support and for enduring endless conversations about both the content and the process of putting all the pieces together. My wife, Megan, has the uncanny ability to understand when to pull me back from the brink just before I lose all of my friends and family from benign neglect. My parents have helped me in more ways than I can count and more than I even realize. This project would not have been possible without their guidance, wisdom and advice. I have also been blessed with an unbelievably great set of friends. Tim Barr and Chad Bosse have made this project better by continually forcing me to take account of how my research will effect change in the lives of the research participants. There are not enough words to express my depth of feeling for Harmony Newman and David Edwards. Any attempt to recount in detail the ways they supported this project and my family through a very difficult period would easily result in a book longer than the one you are currently reading. Additionally, my cohortmate, George Sanders, has both challenged and inspired me as he contributed countless amounts of time and energy to me and this project in all of its various forms through the years. I am forever indebted to him. I would also like to thank those people who were kind enough to take the time to sit and talk with me about their religious experiences. I was humbled by the stories they had to tell, the dedication they main-

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tained to their beliefs, and the earnestness with which they pursued knowledge of themselves and God. It is my hope that this project can be of as much use to them as they have been to me. I would be remiss if I failed to point out how nice it has been to work with my editor, Andrew Berzanskis. Although I’m sure it is pro forma to thank one’s editor, it is no overstatement here when I say that this book would never have even been conceived as such without Andrew. As my friends and colleagues will attest, I never set out to write a book. It was only through Andrew’s guidance and vision that I came to see this project as a single, unified manuscript. Although I remain true to what I told him at lunch in the middle of the project, that I hate the writing process, he made it as painless as possible. Finally, this work was supported by three grants. The Vanderbilt College of Arts and Sciences awarded me a Summer Research Grant in 2006 for initial data collection, the Vanderbilt University Center for Ethics granted funds and a working group for the writing process in 2007, and the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture awarded me a summer fellowship in 2007 for data completion and writing.

1 Resisting Success

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend a week with a group of people who were trying to rethink what religious training might look like in a relatively new kind of church called the Emerging Church. The group of 25 practitioners and thinkers that I was with was committed to avoiding an overly programmatic approach to ministerial training and education. They came from traditional church backgrounds, and for a variety of reasons they had each grown distasteful of the rigidity of those traditions. It is not, I admit, an uncommon story in the history of religion. How many religious movements have been borne out of a dislike of traditions which failed to reflect the desires of a changing society? The history of the Christian church is littered with attempts of varying success to reform and reshape existing church models with the Reformation standing as the most notable attempt in this direction. What marked this particular effort as unique, however, was that the group viewed the source of their frustration not with the particular traditions themselves, but with the way those traditions were maintained. On the very first day of the meetings Mary, a member of an Emerging Church in England, pointed out that “[t]here are two dangers. One is institutionalism and the other is success because that will push it toward institutionalism, and this will cause us to support things just to keep them going. All of the sudden you find yourself doing things that aren’t tied to your vision at all.” The group was very cognizant of how institutionalization, or the development of taken for granted routines, processes and ideologies, limits opportunities for diversity in personal expression. They had all witnessed firsthand religious organizations that did things just because that was the way things had always been done. Damian, a pastor, pointed out that at his old church, “we didn’t know why we were doing half of the things we did, other than that we had just always done them that way.” With these sentiments as a backdrop, the rest of the week was spent in an attempt to figure out how to structure 1

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The Emerging Church

opportunities for people to have access to extant knowledge and skill sets without becoming overly programmatic and institutionalized. Frequently, individuals in the group would engage me in one on one conversation about this dilemma, seeking my opinion as a sociologist interested in formal organizations and religion. At the time, however, I could offer very little in the way of help. There simply was not much scholarship about organizations which wanted to avoid institutionalization. In fact, in one of the more comprehensive attempts to understand the intersection between religion and formal organization Neil Demerath had written that “[l]ike all efficient collectivities, churches require a modicum of unquestioning loyalty, unswerving commitment, and unstinting support” (Demerath 1995:460). In other words, not only was there a lack of research about exactly how to avoid institutionalization, but there was some evidence which suggested that conformity was absolutely necessary for any sustained effort at organized religion. In my moment to justify my attendance at the conference as more than simply a gawker or curious scientist, I fell woefully short. In the end, there was a call for more conversation but no agreement about how training opportunities could be widespread and available without being regimented. The dilemma posed by this group raised interesting questions about institutionalization and organizations that stuck with me long after the end of the weekend. Namely, is it possible to resist the forces compelling an organization to adopt the same or similar policies and practices to other organizations in their field? Can an organization, in this case a religious organization, avoid implementing the practices and belief systems that dominate their field and continue to thrive? What would that look like? How would such an organization operate? Would outsiders take them seriously? If an organization resisted institutionalization, what would hold it together? These questions spawned a study that lasted more than two years, involving countless conversations and observations about the nature of organizational resistance as practiced in the Emerging Church. The Emerging Church movement is an ideal location for examining these questions because the movement is well established with a distinct identity and approach to organizing. Although there is no dominant or overarching organizational structure, the principles of individual organizations is strikingly cohesive. In the pages of this text, I draw on interview and ethnographic data from organizations within the Emerging Church movement in order to examine how organizational structures, processes and ideologies might avoid the danger of institutionalism that Mary pointed out above.

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The result is the general beginnings of how such resistant organizations operate. Religion and Organizations

Paul DiMaggio, one of the most prominent organizational scholars of our time, explains that there is much to be gained by bringing together organizational studies and the sociology of religion: Because much religious activity is institutionalized and carried out through formal organizations (e.g., churches, religiously affiliated charities, religious presses, and broadcasters), students of religion may have something to learn from the experience of their colleagues in the organizations field. Because the world of religious organizations is so diverse and because many religious organizations pursue goals and employ structures quite unlike those the firms, service organizations, and public agencies on which most organizational research has focused, it is equally likely that organizational behaviorists have much to learn from students of organized religion (DiMaggio 1998:7).

Patricia Chang (2003:130-131) echoes this sentiment, noting that religious scholars are drawn to institutional theories and analysis in part because they are among the few “organizational perspectives that pay attention to the role of cultural and symbolic processes relative to organizations.” In other words, the field of religion in contemporary U.S. society is an ideal setting for exploring the competing forces of institutionalization as religious organizations are subject to pressures from a variety of sources. Rational choice theorists taking a market approach to religion (Iannacone 1997; Stark 1997; Stark and Bainbridge 1996) have demonstrated that religion in the U.S. is, to some extent, a marketplace where organizations compete with one another for resources (i.e., money, people, time, power). At the same time, Wuthnow (1987, 1988) and others (Berger 1990 [1967], Berger and Luckman 1967 [1966]) have shown that environmental forces work to constrain choice and action while allowing for survival and persistence of some organizations. Indeed, it is easy to characterize religious organizations as among the most institutionalized organizations in our society. Many, if not most, religious services follow a set script that varies little from week to week or even from year to year. The same service is performed regardless of who shows up to “participate” in the worship. Similarly, identification with one religion or denomination is often indicative of a corresponding belief system. Even groups which vary on important theological matters

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The Emerging Church

still retain organizational structures (e.g., denominations and congregations) and practices (e.g., annual meetings, the calling of pastors), which are extremely similar. This similarity, say organizational theorists, is due to the powers of isomorphism which compel organizations to become structurally homogenous. Isomorphism refers to the process whereby organizations adopt similar practices and structures over time resulting in a dominant organizational form both within and across fields. Scholars generally agree on four types of isomorphic pressure: competitive, coercive, normative, and mimetic (DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Conformity through competition arises as organizations increasingly adopt the practices and structures which were the most efficient and have the greatest technical benefit. Coercive forces are due to external regulatory agencies (e.g., governments) which impose structures and rules on organizations in an increasingly rationalized modern world. Similarly, normative pressures associated with professionalization provide this same function. Finally, theorists recognize that much conformity is the result of the intentional mimicry of practices from other organizations in an attempt to reduce uncertainty. The development of standard practices through isomorphic forces is seen as crucial for the survival of any organization in a particular field, but especially for new organizations. The traditional model depicts the forces of isomorphism as irresistible, requiring compliance in exchange for survival (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Oliver 1991). Orru et al. (1991:362) remark that “maverick organizations that fail to conform may risk survival as surely as an inefficient firm” as a way of explaining why there is so little sustained organizational variation in a particular field. This general sentiment is reflected in DiMaggio and Powell’s (1991:74) conceptualization of institutionalization as something which is inevitable, noting that, of those organizations which manage to survive and thrive, some “respond to external pressures quickly; others change only after a long period of resistance.” For all of its explanatory power, this model of organizational stasis and homogeneity is flawed, of course. Explaining the social world of organizations, particularly with regard to religion, does not mean accounting for developments which occur only in the long run or are reified to a totalizing force. The most common outcome for an organization is demise, regardless of the adoption of dominant practices and structures. Sociologists studying the historical development of religion in the relatively open religious marketplace that exists in the United States have shown that organizational form is only one of a

Resisting Success

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number of pertinent variables which determine success (Finke and Stark 1992). It is my contention that in any organizational field, there exist organizations, even if only for a relatively short period of time, that reside beyond the boundaries of isomorphic pressure. These organizations typically garner very little attention and are treated as outliers if they are treated at all (Chang 2003; Oliver 1991). However, they are worth examining, and the field of religion offers a good setting to begin systematically exploring those organizational activities, ideologies and structures which resist institutionalization. Thus, the purpose of this book is not simply an exposition of the Emerging Church as a type of Christianity, or as a religious movement, or as a type of theology. Those things have been handled adequately elsewhere by Marti (2005), Bielo (2009, 2011), and Edson (2006) and Moody (2010) respectively among others. Certainly I will be drawing from all of those sources as necessary, but what this book is mostly concerned with is the intentional organizational strategies implemented by the people in the Emerging Church as a way to resist the most dominant institutional forces of our time. So while this study is about the Emerging Church, it is, to be more specific, about the way the Emerging Church organizes itself. After extensive observation and analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the strategies implemented by the people in the Emerging Church offer at least the beginnings of how to think about organizational resistance to institutional pressures. As organizational scholars are probably well aware, this is an understudied and inadequately theorized part of the organizational landscape. I do not suspect that everything the people in the Emerging Church does “works” to resist institutional forces, nor do I think this is the only organization in the field of religion or otherwise that attempts this kind of organizational resistance. I endeavor, in the course, of the text to examine these issues critically, but the focus here is not on a complete exposition of the various dynamics within the Emerging Church. Ultimately, the Emerging Church here serves as a case for helping to think through what principles and strategies might be implemented in order for an organization to avoid or resist institutional forces. It is not my position that the Emerging Church is always what it claims to be even with regards to its anti-institutional response. Rather, I think that the Emerging Church is one of the most explicit and intentional attempts in this direction. As a starting place for theorizing about the ways organizations might strategically avoid what many have posited as the unavoidable iron cage of rationalization and isomorphic pressures, a researcher could hardly ask for a better group. All of which

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The Emerging Church

is the long way of saying that I do not suspect that this text will be the last word on organizational resistance, but it is my sincere hope that it gets the conversation started. Case Description

The Emerging Church has its foundations with the publication of The Emerging Church by Larson and Osborne in 1970. This text offers not only a spirit or ethos which is still found in the Emerging Church today, but also many of the particular principles that are found and discussed in the chapters below. For example, the use and defense of the present participle “emerging” as the designation for their understanding of church remains the dominant way of referring to this particular group of Christians. It is important because it emphasizes that people in the Emerging Church advocate neither a return to some idyllic golden age of the church or any particular “right” conception of how church should be in the future, but rather that “the Church is in a process, moving toward a fulfillment of its calling” (Larson and Osborne 1970:11). Such an understanding inherently guards against static statements or arrangements of church. In other words, their insistence on the present participle is really a call to resist institutionalization and is at the very core of their conception of church. Also, the juxtaposing of the Emerging Church as an alternative to the institutional church is firmly established in this text as Larson and Osborne’s vision is explicitly contrasted with their previous experiences in traditional churches. From the beginning the spirit of the movement has been in opposition to dominant, mainstream religious practices. For people in the Emerging Church, as I will demonstrate below, there is very little difference between the various denominations and versions within mainstream Christianity. Although beliefs may differ, the way those beliefs are expressed are, to them, strikingly similar. They believe the Emerging Church offers a different way of doing church, not a different theological system or set of beliefs. Finally, a reliance on integration as opposed to differentiation is laid out by Larson and Osborne in language which is common in both my interviews and the blogs and books about the Emerging Church today: “Whereas the heady polarities of our day seek to divide us into an eitheror camp, the mark of the Emerging Church will be its emphasis on bothand” (Larson and Osborne 1970:10). This last phrase in particular, “both-and,” came up throughout my time in the field as a way for my respondents to explain how they made decisions. Their choices were frequently guided by an attempt to incorporate both choices rather than

Resisting Success

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choose one over another. Although it would not be until the 1990s that the movement would take off, many of the founding ideas and concepts, such as the emphasis on active participation over passive consumption, and equality and ability over training and credentials, were present in the early 1970s.1 The Emerging Church, as it exists today, is a series of grassroots groups connected via the web in a global network. It arose in the late 20th century as both a response to and continuation of the “seeker” movement which produced so many of the successful megachurches which currently abound. The Emerging Church could best be described as a loosely coupled organization with no distinct leader, vision, or mission. Although the Emerging Church is international in scope, its focus is primarily in the United States and UK as a collection of congregations operating in the evangelical Christian tradition (Bielo 2011; Drane 2006). The general consensus on a goal is to create and sustain an open conversation about faith and spirituality in a Christian context with all who desire to participate. Emerging church texts (e.g, Jones 2011; Pagitt and Jones 2008) and congregants frequently refer to the notion of friendship as the primary principle upon which all interactions are based, associating them quite explicitly with the Quakers (Packard 2008). Boundaries, especially with regard to membership, are mediated with as little formal organization and bureaucracy as possible (Chia 2011). Authority arising from formal training is deemphasized and more importance is placed on lay leadership (Gibbs and Bolger 2005; Packard 2011). Additionally, Emerging Church congregations actively seek to be engaged with the surrounding culture. Rather than avoiding popular culture or attempting to make secular society conform to religious ideals, people in the Emerging Church embrace technology and modernity (or postmodernity) (Chia 2011; Drane 2006; Ganiel 2006). Emerging Churches can also be identified by their organizational structure, mode of worship and their theological beliefs, each of which arises as a reaction to mainline evangelical denominations and serve to reinforce one another (Bielo 2011; Packard 2011). Their organizing ethos is adopted in direct opposition to the institutional church as exemplified by the automatically bureaucratic, unabashedly marketdriven mega-church movement (Bielo 2011). Concurrent with this organizational structure is a belief system which emphasizes ancient Christian tradition and practices, the need for an ecumenical, catholic Church, and a Christ centered reading of the Bible (Bielo 2009; Gibbs and Bolger 2005). Drane (2006:8) notes that any particular Emerging Church congregation is “either emerging from a

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The Emerging Church

positive relationship with the ancient tradition, or from a negative reaction against the historically more recent tradition of Protestant fundamentalism,” a notion that anthropologist James Bielo (2009) captures as the “Ancient-Future” stance of the Emerging Church. Additionally, the Emerging Church, while sustaining broad appeal, is most often characterized as being a home for the “dechurched” rather than the “unchurched” (Packard 2011). Rather than trying to attract people who have never been to church, the unchurched, the Emerging Church often appeals to people who have had negative experiences with institutional religion. Many of the people described in the pages below fit this profile of people who desired a connection with a collective religious experience, but had left mainstream Christianity due to what they perceived as the stifling conditions in their previous church homes. While the Emerging Church strikes most as being a “liberal” religious group, this is only true in the broadest sense of the word, meaning that they endeavor to be open and not restrictive. While the movement tends to attract people who share the same basic demographics as those who are politically liberal (i.e., young, welleducated), and certainly individuals have their own politics, there is no sense from my field work that there is a common political agenda for the Emerging Church as a whole. Rather, the common refrain from my time in the field was of a group of people concerned with their local communities. My experiences echoed what nearly all academic treatments of the movement have suggested. As Bader-Saye points out, this stands in direct opposition to more mainstream and popular forms of religion when he notes that “[u]nlike the megachurch that seeks to centralise and Christianise cultural activity by building its own schools, gyms, bookstores and coffee shops on the church ‘campus,’ Emerging Christians tend to prefer bringing the church into the world” (BaderSaye 2006:20). This commitment to their immediate context along with the emphasis on being in conversation practically mitigates against the kind of divisive rhetoric which makes up so much political debate in modern America. Determining the scope of a movement which intentionally resists traditional categorization and studiously avoids tacking on to larger organizational structures is a tenuous exercise at best. There is, clearly, no central clearing house or anything approximating a denominational structure which keeps tabs on the number of Emerging Church congregations and indeed individual congregations, for reasons explained below, are loathe to even keep track of the number of people

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attending worship services in a given week. Further complicating the matter is the lack of scholarly work done in this area. Many of the numbers which are passed around come from people who are intrinsically tied up in the movement and as such cannot be treated as fully reliable. For example, the Emerging Church offshoot in the United Kingdom known as Fresh Expressions is said to number several thousand, but this was reported by Graham Cray, an Anglican Bishop who was responsible for spearheading the development of Fresh Expressions as a response to dwindling membership in traditional churches across England (Southam 2009), and the validity of this number has not been verified by independent sources. Similarly, Tony Jones, in a book based on his dissertation research from Princeton Theological Seminary, argues without giving concrete numbers that the Emerging Church is large enough to be classified as a social movement (Jones 2011). However, Mr. Jones is an admitted longtime Emerging Church insider who at one time served as the spokesperson for Emergent Village, the largest parachurch organization in the Emerging Church. Regardless, there are a couple of indicators of the reach of the movement. First, Emergent Village sponsors cohorts in cities around the world where people gather to discuss issues of life and faith relevant to people in the Emerging Church. Cohorts exist in over 60 cities in the U.S. and around the world in Japan, Ghana and South Africa (Emergent Village Cohorts 2011). Similarly, www.ginkworld.net maintains a voluntary database of self-identified Emerging Church congregations and lists over 300 in 39 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., 6 Canadian provinces, and 10 European countries along with New Zealand and Australia (Ginkworld 2010). It is almost certainly the case, however, that the Emerging Church attracts more attention than its membership rolls, if they existed, would lead one to believe that it should. As I discuss below, the Emerging Church often becomes a foil for fundamentalists and others who decry the intentionally difficult to pin down beliefs of the people in the Emerging Church as heretical and blasphemous. This attention has led to profiles of the movement and key leaders in many prominent publications throughout the first decade of the 2000s (see below). More anecdotally, I can say that in my years of studying religion as sociologist, taking students into congregations for classes, and serving as a consultant for pastors and leadership teams, I have yet to come across anyone involved with a mainstream congregation who was not aware of the Emerging Church in at least a very general way. In other words, the Emerging Church certainly has penetrated the common consciousness within religious circles even if their overall numbers do nothing to

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threaten the viability of denominations.

more established congregations and

Contradictions and Criticisms

There exists no Emerging Church in the world that conforms to all aspects of the description above or to the organizational principles identified below. However, while people within the Emerging Church are often quick to point out their commitment to, and celebration of, diversity, this happens much less often in practice. In fact, there are enough commonalities within the movement not only to piece together the description above from academic sources but also to be stereotyped by its own critics (and adherents). Blogger Marc Heinrich (2005) and co-authors Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck separately produced lists entitled “You might be Emerging if…” The two lists are extensive and contain many of the stereotypes of the Emerging Church crowd and a number of similarities. The DeYoung and Kluck (2008) list is here: You might be an emergent Christian: if you listen to U2, Moby, and Johnny Cash's Hurt (sometimes in church), use sermon illustrations from The Sopranos, drink lattes in the afternoon and Guinness in the evenings, and always use a Mac; if your reading list consists primarily of Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, N. T. Wright, Stan Grenz, Dallas Willard, Brennan Manning, Jim Wallis, Frederick Buechner, David Bosch, John Howard Yoder, Wendell Berry, Nancy Murphy, John Frank, Walter Winks, and Lesslie Newbigin (not to mention McLaren, Pagitt, Bell, etc.) and your sparring partners include D. A. Carson, John Calvin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Wayne Grudem;... if your idea of quintessential Christian discipleship is Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Desmond Tutu; if you don't like George W. Bush or institutions or big business or capitalism or Left Behind Christianity; if your political concerns are poverty, AIDS, imperialism, war-mongering, CEO salaries, consumerism, global warming, racism, and oppression and not so much abortion and gay marriage; if you are into bohemian, goth, rave, or indie; if you talk about the myth of redemptive violence and the myth of certainty; if you lie awake at night having nightmares about all the ways modernism has ruined your life; if you love the Bible as a beautiful, inspiring collection of works that lead us into the mystery of God but is not inerrant; if you search for truth but aren't sure it can be found; if you've ever been to a church with prayer labyrinths, candles, PlayDoh, chalk-drawings, couches, or beanbags (your youth group doesn't count); if you loathe words like linear, propositional, rational, machine, and hierarchy and use words like ancient-future, jazz,

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mosaic, matrix, missional, vintage, and dance; if you grew up in a very conservative Christian home that in retrospect seems legalistic, naive, and rigid; if you support women in all levels of ministry, prioritize urban over suburban, and like your theology narrative instead of systematic; if you disbelieve in any sacred-secular divide; if you want to be the church and not just go to church; if you long for a community that is relational, tribal, and primal like a river or a garden; if you believe who goes to hell is no one's business and no one may be there anyway; if you believe salvation has a little to do with atoning for guilt and a lot to do with bringing the whole creation back into shalom with its Maker; if you believe following Jesus is not believing the right things but living the right way; if it really bugs you when people talk about going to heaven instead of heaven coming to us; if you disdain monological, didactic preaching; if you use the word "story" in all your propositions about postmodernism - if all or most of this torturously long sentence describes you, then you might be an emergent Christian.

These lists generated much discussion from critics and adherents alike. Although many within the movement took issue at the profiles claiming, as the caricatured often do, that the descriptions were overly stereotypical and negative, they were also quick to admit the grains of truth contained within them. From an outsider’s standpoint the issue is not so much the response generated by the two lists but rather that they contained so much overlap. The characteristics presented thus carry more weight and do paint the Emerging Church, for all of its rhetoric and seemingly genuine desire to the contrary, to be the home of young, well-educated, suburban, white people. Although there are certainly other issues contained in the lists that are relevant, such as theological orientations, these specifics engendered far less backlash than the overall sentiment of homogeneity which people in the Emerging Church categorically reject. This is interesting because critics of the Emerging Church have focused their energies much more heavily on the “heretical” stance of Emerging Church theology. The general resistance to metanarratives, including historical Christianity, an interpretive stance to scripture, and an embrace of doubt are among their chief concerns (Carson 2005). However, people within the Emerging Church are not bothered by these accusations. While not everyone, or even the majority of people, within the movement would claim that particular theological identity, as a group they are relatively unconcerned with defending their beliefs.2 The result is that the Emerging Church and its critics often end up talking past one another and instead speaking only back to their

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constituents as they are unwilling or unable to engage each other on common ground. This dynamic is articulated well in Bielo’s (2009:222224) account of an exchange between Emerging Church pastor Doug Pagitt and conservative radio talk show host Todd Friehl on Friehl’s show, The Way of the Master. As Bielo astutely points out, the conversation is contentious with very little room for compromise even though both are relying on the same source of authority, Biblical scripture, to make their arguments. Pagitt, a savvy veteran and longtime voice within the Emerging Church, knows full well that he is not going to change Todd Friehl’s mind, and Mr. Friehl, who gets paid to articulate his position on his own radio show, is certainly aware that Doug Pagitt is not going to have a conversion to his line of thought. In essence, both parties are reinforcing their positions for the audience. For Mr. Friehl, that audience consists largely of the people listening to his show and for Mr. Pagitt, that audience is comprised mostly of bloggers and others within the Emerging Church circle. While Doug Pagitt certainly does not seem to agree with Mr. Friehl’s line of argument, he in no way addresses, and seems completely unbothered by, the central criticism of Todd’s argument which is, basically, that the Emerging Church utilizes a relativistic theological approach. On the other hand, the actual, or perceived, lack of diversity within the Emerging Church goes largely uncommented on by critics, and this is the real concern of people inside the movement. The most dominant response to the “You might be emergent if…” stereotypes was a conversation, largely though not exclusively online, about whether the people in the movement could rightly be stereotyped. The conclusion from my respondents was typically an affirmation that while the people are fairly homogenous, it was not the desired state of affairs. As one worship leader told me half-jokingly, “We’re a very diverse congregation. We’ve got every kind of white guy you can imagine in here.” When I asked him why it had occurred to him to pay attention to the diversity of the congregation he said that “it’s one of the things that we say we’re about, diversity and openness, and I truly believe we are, but we just aren’t very good at it yet.” This general profile of the Emerging Church as a group that desires a diversity it is not able to achieve was, for the most part, confirmed in the course of my research. Although it was not the focus of my observations, it was difficult to escape at times. This lack of diversity is potentially critical for an organization and movement built around difference and conversation as I describe below. Homogeneity within the ranks only serves to limit the fuel necessary to sustain such organizations.

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Organizational Culture

The Emerging Church can be further described in comparison to both the dominant organizational model in the field and the alternative organizational forms which arose as a response. The qualities of the dominant organizational form have been covered extensively, but it is worth spending a little time here reviewing the characteristics of the dominant mode of organizing in the field of religion. The rational bureaucracy is currently the only model in the field of religion which allows for rapid, widespread growth and legitimacy. This model is an institutionalized form of organization relying on specific routines and predictable patterns or scripts for carrying out everyday activities. There is very little question about who is responsible for a particular sector of the ministry or how he/she is supposed to go about running said ministry. This highly rationalized system has been adopted and imposed, sometimes wholesale, from the business world, frequently making large churches indistinguishable from large corporations (Thumma 1996). Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear pastors openly admit to viewing themselves as the CEO of the church. As an attempt to move away from bureaucratic governance, many smaller religious organizations such as house churches rely on collective decision making through democratic or consensual method, with an explicitly non-hierarchical stance promoting an egalitarian organizational structure with minimal division of labor. These efforts fall broadly under the classification of alternative organizations (Ferree and Martin 1995; Rothschild-Whitt 1979, Rothschild and Whitt 1986). These churches typically trade size for ideological control, sacrificing growth potential for a self-determined belief system. This has historically provided the range of opportunities for responses to the dominant paradigm. The Emerging Church, however, offers another way of coordinating organizational activity. As I demonstrate in the chapters below, they neither embrace or reject the principles of the dominant organizational form (i.e., bureaucracy) or those espoused by alternative organizations (e.g., rotating leadership, feminist organizations). Instead, they endeavor to organize in a way that avoids adherence to any particular form of organizational behavior, recalling the both/and spirit laid out by Larson and Osborn in their foundational text discussed above. To put it in the terms Mary used at the conference I described in the opening, the people in the Emerging Church seek to intentionally resist institutionalized organizational procedures of all kinds, whether dominant or alternative, bureaucratic and hierarchical or democratic and consensual.

14

The Emerging Church

Organizational Events

Worship services are perhaps where the differences between the Emerging Church and the institutional church are felt most. In general, the Emerging Church has become known for a “coffee shop” feel at worship services. This basically means that services are more casual than in traditional churches and people are welcome to engage in conversations or activities which are not necessarily planned ahead of time (e.g., dancing, painting, reading, etc.). Scott Bader-Saye, in his article “Improvising Church: An Introduction to the Emerging Church Conversation,” notes that [t]he Emerging Church movement embraces worship that is multisensory, multi-layered and multi-media in contrast to the modernist emphasis on a word-centered, rational worship that contains the body in the pew so that the mind can do all the work…emerging worship reclaims all the accoutrements of piety – candles, icons, incense, kneeling and chanting – alongside the projection screens, electric guitars and televisions rolling looped images. The technological elements are intentionally subdued, made subservient to personal connection and spiritual reflection. (Bader-Saye 2006:19)

A common form of worship involves “stations” where congregants worship asynchronously, but collectively, spending as much or as little time as they wish at each of the various stations set up around the room. For example, I visited one service at a congregation in Ft. Worth, TX where there were stations for the administration of communion, artistic expression of a particular section of scripture, individual conversations with the pastor(s) and a place for quiet meditation. The worship time was scheduled for two hours and people came and went freely, cycling through some or all of the stations at their own pace. Occasionally, someone from the worship team would get up and play a song, prompting some people to sing along before returning to the rotation of stations. The worship style of the congregations in this study are difficult to generalize, and no individual congregation stands out because of a particularly distinctive liturgy. Every congregation in this study utilized different worship styles including elements of traditional and mainstream liturgies which had the effect of connecting the congregation to a larger, already legitimated, faith tradition. The worship service on a given week at any of the Emerging Churches in this study might not be all that different from mainstream worship services. However, from week to week the service is likely to change

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Table 1.1: Worship Elements Congregation Crossroads Faith Communion Nontraditional a Seating Band b

Liturgy Creative c Worship Creeds d Sermon (Traditional) Sermon (Interactive) Scripture Reading Offering

Calvary Fellowship

Incarnate Living Word Word  





















































































































a

“Traditional” seating is chairs or pews aligned in rows facing the front of the church. Among the nontraditional seating arrangements I observed were people sitting on couches and floors, sometimes laying down and frequently sitting in a circle. In order to best use their space, the seating at Crossroads is set up such that one half of the congregation cannot see the other half.

b

I use this designation to note when a congregation uses a liturgy that is explicitly connected to another tradition. For example, Calvary, despite being a small congregation would sometimes use a Catholic mass liturgy for a period of time.

c

Open or Creative Worship is common in many Emerging Churches and typically involves the use of stations that people are free to participate in at any time during the worship. These stations might include anything from painting and journaling to more traditional elements such as self-serve communion.

d

Sermons were sometimes delivered in a very traditional style where one person talked and everyone else listened. At other times, however, it was much more interactive, like a conversation.

16

The Emerging Church

substantially. In table 1.1 I have noted the presence of worship elements that I observed. However, it is quite possible that I was not able to account for all the worship elements used. In the chapters below, I describe some of these worship practices in more detail. Organizational Ideology

With this seeming lack of control and institutional authority, it should come as no surprise that the Emerging Church faces staunch criticism from some other religious groups. At the other end of the religious spectrum from the Emerging Church resides fundamentalism. To the extent that the Emerging Church can be said to have a religious opponent it is nearly always fundamentalists who decry Emerging Church as a relativistic, secular form of religious expression (e.g., Carson 2005). Indeed, the fundamentalist attack on Emerging Church is often so extreme as to place the former outside the bounds of the stringently ecumenical Emerging Church. Unlike most fundamentalists, the people in the Emerging Church typically, though not always embrace culture, eschew proclaiming the inerrancy of any text, and seek to become integrated into society. This is not to suggest that everyone in the Emerging Church is theologically or politically liberal. In fact, they would reject that division altogether. To truly reside at the other end of the religious spectrum from fundamentalists requires not embracing or creating a different category, but rejecting the categories themselves. As Bader-Saye (2006:17) notes, “in theological terms, Emerging Churches are seeking a third way beyond the liberal-conservative divide.” Occupying this rather unique position in the religious landscape has brought no small amount of attention to the Emerging Church. In 2005 PBS devoted two episodes of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly to the Emerging Church movement, profiling some key leaders as well as some of the detractors and critics. In that same year, Brian McLaren, a pastor of an Emerging Church in Virginia was listed by Time as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” The ensuing years have seen feature stories in nearly every prominent newspaper and magazine in the country including the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times Magazine, and U.S. News and World Report. This has made minor celebrities out of a number of Emerging Church leaders and pastors to the extent that they now frequently derive all or part of their income from speaking engagements and books. In addition to Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Doug Pagitt and Mark Driscoll have been featured in national publications. Although the popular press fascination with the movement

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17

has died down in recent years, there is no shortage of attention being paid to the Emerging Church in religious circles. If my own Google News feed is any indication, as major media outlets have paid somewhat less attention lately, the debate and conversation on blogs and in religious publications has only ramped up. Data

Trying to empirically examine a group like the Emerging Church presents inherent challenges as has been documented by nearly every researcher who has dealt with this movement (Bielo 2011; Chia 2010; Drane 2006). With such a disparate group of beliefs and practices, where does one even start? Who is included? What congregations and groups are left out? There is a need within the field of institutionalism for work which explains these kinds of anomalous situations as so much scholarship in the past 25 years has been conducted in the long shadow cast by DiMaggio and Powell’s call for explaining why “there is such startling homogeneity of organizational forms and practices” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:148). Such a perspective misses, however, those organizational forms and practices that explicitly resist homogenization. Ultimately, my interest in the Emerging Church as a different kind of organization steered me toward a method that would help to highlight those differences so they could investigated. The extended case method (ECM) offers one of the best ways of gathering data from such a group (Burawoy 1991, 1998a). The principles of ECM dictate that researchers enter the field with extensive knowledge of existing theories, in this instance existing institutional and organizational theory, which should be, but are not, able to explain the case at hand. This method is particularly good at uncovering and making sense of anomalous cases that are not explained by existing theory. Rather than looking for the inherent contradictions within a particular group, ECM takes theory as the starting place and investigates the structures and processes which ought to be accounted for by those theories but which consistently do not fit into an existing framework.3 Instead of writing these cases off as outliers in the field, the extended case method proposes investigating them as a group unto themselves in order to refine and extend existing theory. Thus, the data contained here do not attempt a conclusive picture of the Emerging Church in the United States. There are dominant similarities and themes between the congregations which I highlight below and suspect are present throughout the movement, but this study is not an attempt to draw boundaries around the movement. In any case,

18

The Emerging Church

such an effort would nearly impossible due to the anti-institutional stance, lack of accounting procedures and resistance to labels contained across the vast middle of the Emerging Church spectrum. Aside from this logistical difficulty, no attempt at comprehensiveness is attempted for theoretical reasons. The goal of this study is to identify specific practices within the anti-institutional Emerging Church that allows the movement, and specific congregations and groups to resist and avoid institutional pressures. This does not require accounting for every variation within the movement, but instead, a purposeful sample is necessary (see appendix). I conducted 59, in-depth interviews (see table 1.2) and logged over 100 hours of participant observation fieldwork guided by the reflexive principles of ECM. The fieldwork took place in 6 congregations (see table 1.3) where I attended various functions and events including strategy meetings, worship services, and Bible studies. Additionally, I participated in an international conference explicitly focused on how to do training for Emerging Church practitioners and leaders. This weeklong conference developed into an ongoing working group. Interview data were collected using a semi-structured interview guide that focused on processes surrounding organizational structure, congregational leadership, and religious procedures and routines. These interviews were guided thematically, but were flexible enough to both encourage new conversations to arise and to allow for examining evolving theories and ideas produced through the continual analysis of previous experiences in the field. The interviews averaged just over one hour in length and were conducted at a time and place convenient for the participant. I made a conscious effort to interview both people in formal leadership positions as well as congregants who were not currently in leadership positions. I paid particular attention to the procedures surrounding traditional religious routines in a Protestant setting (e.g., administration of the sacraments, pastoring, liturgy) as well as mainstream organizational routines (e.g., leadership, structure) when in the field. My focus in these observations was not so much on identifying the particular denominational strand present in each process, but rather on discovering how these easily routinized procedures were negotiated by a group of people who professed a desire to avoid routines. Fieldnotes were first analyzed immediately following the time in the field with an eye toward comparing them back to the interviews, checking for both internal consistency and theoretical contradiction.

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Table 1.2: Interviewee List Pseudonym Cody Jeff Jeff Jessica Melissa David Sally Wade Bob Brad Brett Chad Fred Greg Harmony Jimmy Mark Tim Abby Diane Eric Ethan Joe Fred Kenny Reggie Rose William Aaron Eric Harry Noah Pete Ryan Amanda Chris Clark Frances Jeremy Justin Ricky

Participant Position Congregant Pastor Pastor (follow up) Congregant Congregant Congregant Pastor Congregant Building Director Former Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Pastor Deacon Pastor Congregant Congregant Seminary Student Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Pastor Congregant Congregant Congregant Pastor Pastor Congregant Congregant Congregant Congregant Pastor Worship Team Congregant Pastor

Home Church Calvary Calvary Calvary Calvary Calvary Calvary Calvary Calvary Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Crossroads Faith Faith Faith Faith Faith Faith Faith Faith Faith Faith Fellowship Fellowship Fellowship Fellowship Fellowship Fellowship Incarnate Word Incarnate Word Incarnate Word Incarnate Word Incarnate Word Incarnate Word Incarnate Word

Gender Age M 40 M 31 M 31 F 40 F 26 M 36 F 30 M 41 M 27 M 29 M 27 M 26 M 38 M 29 F 27 M 36 M 38 M 39 F 22 F 41 M 30 M 19 M 52 M 40 M 32 M 29 F 19 M 40 M 32 M 22 M 24 M 26 M 29 M 45 F 25 M 26 M 40 F 31 M 31 M 22 M 34

20

The Emerging Church

Pseudonym George Megan Melinda Ned Jerica Ricky Ronald Damian Erica Hanley Langston Mary Parker Patti Rob Vance Gary Tony

Participant Position Music Minister Congregant Congregant Intern Congregant Congregant Pastor Pastor Intern Congregant Congregant Congregant Unaffiliated Conference Leader Pastor Pastor Emergent Board Member Seminary Student / Blogger

Home Church Gender Age Living Word M 32 Living Word F 28 Living Word F 26 Living Word M 24 Living Word F 20 Living Word M 29 Living Word M 39 Conference Participant M 34 Conference Participant F 20 Conference Participant M 29 Conference Participant M 24 Conference Participant F 30 Conference Participant M 53 Conference Participant F 48 Conference Participant M 26 Conference Participant M 42 N/A

M

38

House Church

M

27

Congregational Characteristics

The congregations included in this study were chosen carefully to explore particular organizational elements. Existing institutional research explains that organizational size, longevity, and affiliation all affect the kinds of homogenizing forces experienced by the organization. As a way of describing the congregations that serve as the basis for this research, I break them down here by those organizational characteristics. One of the benefits of studying a group as diverse as the Emerging Church is that there is not a particular model which must be explored. Instead, variety is demanded in the search for accuracy. Size

New institutionalism theorists have shown that large size subjects an organization to substantially more isomorphic pressures. I spent time in two congregations that would be considered large, especially by Emerging Church standards. Crossroads had around 500 worshippers per week during the time I spent with the congregation and Faith worshipped over 350 and moved to incorporate a second service shortly

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Table 1.3: Congregational Characteristics Congregation

Seminary Trained Pastor Paid Pastor Denominational Affiliation Own Building Size

e

Length of Time f

Leadership Region

Crossroads

Faith

Y

Y

N

N

Y

N

None

None

None

Y

Y

N

500

350

30

7 YRS 6 YRS Elders and Elders Deacons Midwest Midwest

Calvary Fellowship N

Incarnate Word

Living Word

N

Y

N N N Southern Lutheran Lutheran Baptist Y Y N 150

7 YRS 2 YRS Whole 3 Founding Group Pastors South Southeast

50

200

3 YRS Core Team South

10 YRS Elders Midwest

after my time with them in order to accommodate the growing crowds.4 Crossroads is a community in a southern metropolitan area operating out of its own downtown building which consists of a coffee shop, bookstore, art gallery, recording studio, community meeting center and a weekly farmer’s market. It was founded by Tim, who was one of the early founders of the Emerging Church. While Tim is well-known as a pastor, the band leader, Jacob, might be even more famous in Emerging Church circles as a musician whose songs are sung in Emerging and non-Emerging congregations across the country. Although Crossroads does not claim a denominational affiliation, the community is closely aligned, both formally and informally with Baptist traditions and institutions. For example, their relationship with a local Baptist university has resulted not only in attracting many students to the congregation but also in lectures and classroom experiences facilitated by Crossroads at the university. Additionally, the statement of common beliefs for Crossroads consists of many assertions common to the Baptist tradition such as the necessity of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ (see table 1.4). e

Number of congregants are estimates based on multiple self-report and observational sources. f By “Leadership” or “Governace” I mean the formally recognized decision making body for a particular congregation. Governance does not only occur in these groups, and they are certainly not the only leaders as these designations are somewhat shifting.

22

The Emerging Church

Table 1.4: Written Statements of Faith Faith Statement Characteristic

Congregation Crossroads

Faith Statement/ Statement of Beliefs

Yes

Faith Calvary Fellowship g

None

Yes

h

Yes

Incarnate Living Word Word None

Yes



Bible as Inerrant Forgiveness of Sin Service to Community Jesus as the only way to Heaven Engaged with Culture

















































Inclusion













Love













Participation/ Gifts













Sacraments













Resurrection





































Holism

i

Return of Jesus

g

Faith does not offer a formal mission statement or statement of beliefs. They do have an "About Us" document that I use for the rest of this chart. This should not be taken as merely a semantic difference, however, as the "About Us" document explicitly does not focus on beliefs. h

The mission statement at Calvary is comprised of the Nicene Creed and Mark 12:28-33 wherein Jesus claims that the greatest commandment is to love others as you love yourself. My interviewees told me that these passages were selected intentionally in order to avoid the often divisive conflict that surrounds the formulation of an original mission statement or statement of beliefs. iHolism

is a common term in the Emerging Church and is frequently used to note the interconnectedness of all parts of life. It is a way of proclaiming that there is no division between sacred and secular realms.

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The paid staff at Crossroads consists of three pastors (Lead, Assistant, and Worship), and two administrative office staff whose primary function is to allocate time and space in the building, pay bills, maintain websites and answer phones. The coffee shop and other venues are operated by volunteers. In addition to tithes, operating expenses are covered by the revenue generated from the coffee shop and other events (e.g., donation boxes at art openings, book sales at coffee shop). There is also a board of elders (men only) and group of deacons who make decisions regarding the day to day activity and direction of the congregation in addition to making decisions about finances. New elders are chosen by existing elders from the deacons on an “as-needed” basis. Anyone, regardless of gender, viewed by existing elders and deacons as demonstrating leadership ability may be chosen to be a deacon, there are no official criteria. During the course of this research, the biggest issue Crossroads was facing had to do with size. They were actively trying to figure out how to manage their growth and maintain a sense of community at the same time. Faith is another community founded by one of the early leaders in the Emerging Church, William. His early work focused on bringing together young pastors and church leaders who were concerned with “trying to figure out a different way of doing church” (William interview). Thus, Faith is largely William’s vision of what church should be. This vision is also described in books authored and coauthored by William. The congregation is incorporated as a co-op with a board of directors and voting members. Decisions are made by a majority vote of members who must be members of Faith for six months or more. Membership is open to everyone and requires involvement in the life of the community of Faith. Faith is housed in an old, downtown church building formerly used by a different congregation. Notably, one of the first things the members did upon occupying this building was to take out the wooden pews and replace them with several dozen sofas and loveseats that they procured from local thrift stores and donations. The sofas are organized in a circle where parishioners face one another, thus altering the traditional worship setting where all congregants face forward toward the altar. There is no altar in Faith, only a small swivel stool in the middle of the room where the speaker sits or stands to address the congregation. Faith retains no denominational affiliation and the official stance of the community embraces ecumenicalism. Additionally, Faith has no mission statement. Instead, they offer an extended definition of who they are. This definition proclaims Faith as a place where all facets of life are embraced and explored in an effort to better serve God as a

24

The Emerging Church

group of people who follow Jesus Christ and are committed to sharing life with one another. Interestingly, there is no description of exactly what it means to be a Christian or a follower of Jesus, leaving these sometimes contentious issues up for individual decision and discussion. Longevity

The second dimension that organizational scholars have long pointed out as a primary variable important to institutionalization is time. New organizations must deal with unique challenges specific to their nascent status (Stinchcombe 1965). While mature organizations have a tendency to get stuck in routine procedures producing little innovation, new organizations often feel compelled to adopt the standard, industry-wide practices in order to increase chances of survival. Therefore, I actively sought congregations which were either brand new or had been around for a relatively long time. Although this is not the same as longitudinal data and should not be treated as such, examining both of these kinds of congregations can shed some light on the unique challenges faced by both kinds as they seek to avoid routinization. In addition to Crossroads and Living Word, which have each been in existence for about a decade, I spent time with Calvary which existed for 15 years before dissolving during the process of this research. I was also fortunate enough to come across two newly created congregations, Fellowship Church and Incarnate Word (described in next section). Long Time Calvary Church is the community in this study with the longest history, stretching back to a church-within-a-church ministry in the early 1990s.5 In the winter of 2007, Calvary held its last gathering and dissolved itself as an official organization due to a lack of meeting space and a feeling among the congregants that the church had “run its course” (Cody interview). During those 15 years, Calvary underwent many changes, with worship numbers peaking at over 100 in the early 2000s. When I spent time with them, they were operating out of the home of one of their members and had around 20-30 people attending worship on Sunday nights and two or three small groups which met on Friday nights. Services typically included meals and lasted close to three hours. Despite the fact that they were meeting in a home, they should not be considered a house church. As a community, they had operated out of a building previously, and they viewed this move to a house as only a

Resisting Success

25

temporary status. Although a husband and wife team had been designated as official pastors for the community, neither one of them was ordained or had formal seminary training. There were no paid staff and duties and responsibilities were handled by the group. All offerings gathered went to support outreach and missions agreed upon by the congregation. Although Calvary was deeply embedded in a network of other Emerging Churches and some house churches through various personal connections, they were not exclusively connected to any single denomination or organization. Short Time Fellowship had just celebrated its two year anniversary when I visited them in order to augment my experiences with young Emerging Churches. Led by an unordained former youth pastor and two other unpaid, but full-time, elders, Fellowship also operates a coffee and dessert shop as a ministry a few miles away from the strip center location of the church. There is one service each Sunday with approximately 150 worshippers. They raise all of their money through tithes, but affiliation is nominally maintained through the Southern Baptist Convention as each of the three men on the leadership staff came out of those congregations. It is perhaps no coincidence then, that Fellowship has a very extensive and theologically conservative set of common beliefs such as the inerrancy of the Bible and the fundamental sinfulness of all people. Affiliation

Denominational affiliation is relatively rare among Emerging Churches. However, denominations can often provide financial and other resources that are often in short supply for new congregations. Additionally, denominational affiliation can be a source of legitimacy for some people. Paradoxically, of course, it also provides the opposite function among many emerging churchgoers (see chapter 5), putting these congregations in a precarious position. On the one hand, denominational affiliation provides undeniable benefits. On the other hand, such institutional affiliation can deter people are dissatisfied with traditional churches. There is nothing structural or ideological that prohibits an Emerging Church from retaining denominational affiliation. Although the bulk of the congregations claim no denominational affiliation, there are some that do operate within this traditional framework. In fact, many of these congregations are not even officially “non-denominational.” Instead, the

26

The Emerging Church

congregants refer to themselves as “post-denominational” in order to emphasize their identity as existing outside of the traditional denominational or institutional channels (Bielo 2011). A theoretically interesting subquestion for this study then emerges, How resistant can an organization be when it is embedded in a highly institutionalized framework? While most Emerging Churches can distance themselves and their congregations from institutional forces, this is a much more difficult strategy to employ for the Emerging Church congregation operating under the cover of a traditional denomination. I spent time with two congregations operating within mainline denominational structures associated with traditional congregations. Incarnate Word started as an offshoot of Resurrection, a highly successful suburban ministry led by a charismatic pastor. In an effort to attract and appeal to more singles and young adults, it was decided by the leadership staff at Resurrection that a separate worship community was necessary. This new ministry is located in the arts district of a major urban area and services are held on Wednesday nights in a space which serves as a community coffee shop and office space during the rest of the week. After a year-long process of meeting in people’s homes once a month to “dream” about what Incarnate Word would look like, it was decided by the core team that traditional Sunday morning worship services would not be a good idea for two reasons. First, many of the initial members of the community, including the pastor, played in bands which would have gigs on Saturday nights, making Sunday morning worship attendance unlikely. Second, although Resurrection provided only minimal cover in terms of money and support, there was considerable effort made to ensure that people were not being taken away from the home or mother church. Having services on Wednesday night enabled people, theoretically, to attend both, though my interviews with congregants suggested that only rarely did Incarnate Word members attend Resurrection and Resurrection regulars virtually never set foot in Incarnate Word services. Although Incarnate Word’s budget must get approved by Resurrection’s church council leadership board, they have never requested any changes or raised any serious objections according to the leadership at Incarnate Word. Incarnate Word’s funding comes from offerings, coffee sales, and grants from the denominational missions department as they are considered an official mission within the larger denomination. This independence of funding is not only an important source of pride for them but provides an amount of autonomy from Resurrection. As a way of further solidifying this independence, there are not common statements of faith or belief for the community.

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27

The leadership structure at Incarnate Word consists of only one fulltime, unordained staff member who is responsible for worship coordination and pastoral care as well as administration, running the coffee shop and setting up other events (e.g., community parties, art open houses). Additionally, there is a core team which makes decisions regarding the direction of the congregation. This volunteer group is open only to those who have been invited by the current core group members (see chapter 4 for further discussion). Although there is no official membership, there are typically around 50 people worshipping each week according to my own observations and estimates from respondents. Living Word is similar in that it is also a congregation which operates under the cover of another, more traditional, suburban, churchKing’s Cross. In the summer of 1995, the church council at King’s Cross held a retreat to determine the future of the congregation and invited a well known professor from a local seminary to come in and guide the discussion. The result was the identification of a particular urban neighborhood as an underserved mission field. Living Word was established with funds and resources from King's Cross and currently relies on offerings for 20% of their budget with assistance from King's Cross making up the other 80%. Also, Living Word’s pastor is also currently the Sr. Youth Minister at King's Cross where he spend 20% of his time but earns 80% of his salary. In other words, Living Word is not self-sufficient and would not be able to hold regular services in a building without help from King's Cross. Although most congregational activity, including worship services, are coordinated and run by volunteer teams, there is one other full-time staff member who coordinates worship teams, music groups, outreach, and handles administrative tasks. As the “flagship” model for the Emerging Church within this particular denomination, Living Word draws numerous visitors and a lot of attention which commands an increasing amount of time from the staff.6 Living Word is notable not only for its decade-long existence but also for the many forms and locations the congregations has occupied over the years. Although currently they offer only one service on Sunday mornings, they have, at times, held two services in order to accommodate larger crowds. Attendance fluctuates between 75-100 on a given week, but most estimates put their size around 200 total members. Despite this size, longevity and connection to a traditional, denominational church, the mission statement is decidedly vague. Similarly, the values which underlie the mission statement focus on generic statements of faith, rather than taking a more specific stance as

28

The Emerging Church

King's Cross does. King's Cross proclaims to be a center of discipleship and mission for Jesus Christ in addition to a Purpose Driven Church, referencing the popular church growth model developed by Rick Warren. Although the statements of both congregations are congruent with the denomination’s tenets, they demand decidedly different things of their adherents. Living Word members are under no compunction to evangelize or witness on behalf of Jesus Christ, only to love others as they have been loved. Not an easy task, for sure, but one requiring far less agreement on theological principles. Collective Intentionality

As a sociologist I am drawn to this group precisely because their actions match their rhetoric. Often, qualitative work is about uncovering the unspoken and often contradictory dynamics among a group of people. In my experience with the Emerging Churches in this study, however, this is simply not the case when it comes to organizational strategizing. Above and in the appendix, I discuss my research methodology and sampling strategy which are both aimed at uncovering contradictions in the field, but what I found, with everyone from leaders to congregants and even among some former members, was a striking level of agreement between what was articulated publicly to outsiders, what was said to me privately in interviews and what I was able to observe in everyday practice. This confused me at first as a qualitative researcher trained on the one hand to understand critical examination primarily in the form of contradiction or the identification of opposing social forces and on the other to be driven by the empirical data. Searching for answers, I turned to other academic treatments of the Emerging Church, Bielo (2009, 2011) most notably, to find that for the most extent they were in agreement as well. Even critics of the Emerging Church movement do not base their objections on the notion that the Emerging Church does not do as it says that it does, as we see above. Indeed, there is striking agreement between Emerging Church members and critics about the activity and beliefs of people in the Emerging Church. They simply disagree on the validity of those beliefs. In the end, then, it is their collective intentionality that becomes the foundation for the investigation into organizational resistance. This is not to say that every congregation within the Emerging Church works in the ways described here, but rather to point out that at least for the congregations in this study, their organizational principles display a remarkable consistency with one another. Furthermore, as I argue throughout the text, these principles are centered around resisting

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institutional pressures and thus result in organizational practices counter to what traditional organizational and institutional theory would suggest one would find. Whether it regards the use of professionals, organizational growth, or the articulation of organizational beliefs, I consistently found intentional strategies in place explicitly aimed at countering the rationalizing forces these congregations faced. The fact that these organizational activities matched insiders’ rhetoric and outside descriptions of the group as a whole without the benefit of a central or even dominant organizing presence suggests that the movement is tapping into other kinds of social forces. This text not only begins the process of identifying some of the core organizational values within the Emerging Church, but also works to connect the movement (and potentially others like it) to larger, structural forces that spurred the development of the Emerging Church and account for its continued persistence on the margins of the religious landscape. Despite a history stretching back nearly thirty years and a highly active period which has brought much visibility and growth over the last decade, the Emerging Church maintains a position outside of institutionalized religion. Long after the time when most organizational theory would posit that such a collection of organizations would either succumb to institutional forces or be rendered irrelevant and obsolete, the Emerging Church has done neither. This text investigates the actions and beliefs of individuals within the movement in order to understand precisely how this tension is maintained. Chapter Structure

Current accounts of the Emerging Church do a piecework job at best of explaining the historical development of the movement, and no current account places this development in a larger social context. Chapter 2 remedies both of those shortcomings while showing how the development of the Emerging Church at this point in history is not accidental, but rather connected to the same kinds of social forces that produced other types of religious change. In particular, this chapter explains how the Emerging Church is connected to, but distinct from, other forms of “alternative” religion such as house churches and seekersensitive churches while situating the rise of the Emerging Church as a distinct religious form in explicit opposition to the Megachurch movement. Ultimately this chapter shows how the same elements which produced the massive and far-reaching Megachurch also planted the

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seeds for the Emerging Church as an intensely local and contextual response. The belief system of people in the Emerging Church can hardly be classified as cohesive. However, the commitment of congregants to a spirit of sustained conversation and questioning about normally taken for granted religious elements contributes to a group ideology which refuses to be nailed down. Chapter 3 demonstrates that this commitment to maintaining what sociologist Ann Swidler refers to as “unsettled lives” is an important and intentional strategy employed by people in the Emerging Church in order to avoid dogmatization. In this way, parts of religious life that, once examined, are not typically subject to ongoing investigation in mainstream Christianity (e.g., the meaning of communion) are intentionally subjected to continuous negotiation and interpretation in the Emerging Church. At this point in the text, questions should naturally arise about how anything actually gets done in an organization like the Emerging Church. Chapter 4 explains the strategies that particular congregations employ in order to maintain their ideals and structural position and yet still complete the necessary daily business of running a congregation. Much of this chapter revolves around the use of religious professionals and the role of authority within the organization. This chapter, along with chapter 3, is situated to demonstrate how people in the Emerging Church deliberately and intentionally implement strategies designed to support their ideological commitments outlined in chapter 2. In a general sense, the Emerging Church can be seen as part of a larger tendency in society of some people turning away from monolithic, rationalized organizations in favor of a more contingent and contextual mentality. In chapter 5 I argue that while some people might view the lack of internal organization in the Emerging Church as a hindrance, it is clear that the movement succeeds because of this anti-institutional approach, not despite it. The rise of the Emerging Church at this particular point in history suggests that the recent interest in things like homegrown and local agriculture and the explosion of the DIY (“do-ityourself”) movement in everything from music production to computer programming should not be seen as isolated occurrences, but rather as linked activities that result when a segment of culture is dominated by a few large producers. Chapter 6 offers an understanding of the Emerging Church that arises from previous chapters. I argue that the Emerging Church can best be understood as a type of resistance to traditional, mainstream religious organizations. While the dominant theme within organizational studies in general and religious studies in particular would have us believe that

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the Emerging Church must either join the mainstream or die out, I propose that the ability of the Emerging Church to sustain life in between these two statuses calls for a reconceptualization of this model. The intentional strategies employed by the people in the Emerging Church suggest that it should be understood as a form of organizational resistance. 1 This text is not, however, the only or even the most widely read of what could be considered “foundational texts.” See appendix for a list of popular Emerging Church texts. 2 Even this, of course, is not true across the board. Some with higher profiles in the Emerging Church have felt the pull to at least defend their antidogmatic stance. For example, see the various writings of Tony Jones or, more famously, Brian McLaren’s 2006 manifesto A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed- yet hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian. 3 A good example of the dominant approach to qualitative work from within the field of religion is Pitt’s (2011) investigation into the ways that lay pastors retain a sense of spiritual vocation without the traditional secular markings of the profession (e.g., credentials, pay, etc.). 4 All worship numbers are estimates as everyone I talked to indicated that there is no weekly count taken. 5 A “church-within-a-church” refers to spin-off services and congregations from more established denominationally affiliated congregations. Typically, these are an effort to appeal to younger church goers while retaining the traditions of long-time (and more likely to tithe) parishioners 6 When I first started working on this project, my friends and acquaintances familiar with the Emerging Church continually asked me if I was planning on visiting Living Word. Partially due to its high profile location and its longevity, it has generated a lot of interest among those people in traditional ministries. I sensed a feeling of “If Living Word can do it, then we can to,” among people in the denomination when I discussed Living Word with them.

2 Developing Hyperlocal Congregations

The Emerging Church is, fundamentally, a reactionary movement. Dissatisfied with what they viewed as an overly institutionalized religious field, people began working to find alternative ways to organize religious groups and experiences that emphasized a local response and lack of replication as opposed to the scalable, franchised model of religious organizing that had long been the blueprint for mainline denominations and which has been more recently embraced by the megachurch movement with renewed vigor. Rothschild and Russell (1986) note that it should come as no surprise to find that a group like the Emerging Church has risen from the grassroots to oppose the dominant organizational models. They observed that when one type of organization comes to dominate a particular field, we can expect to find alternatives develop out of the same forces noting that “trends of magnitude, however, often set into motion social forces that oppose them, countertrends that eddy against the main current” (Rothschild and Russell 1986:308). The trend of magnitude in this case is the hyper institutionalization of American religion as manifested in the rise of the suburban megachurch. It is not that people in the Emerging Church have issues with the particular beliefs espoused by the relatively conservative megachurch movement or even with the bureaucratic organizational structure the characterizes the megachurch. Rather the Emerging Church takes issue with the way those beliefs are developed, maintained and communicated. The Emerging Church is not a reaction to the idea of bureaucracy as the dominant organizational form but rather to institutionalization as the dominant force. To put this in the language of organizational theory, people in the Emerging Church are concerned about resisting “the inexorable push toward homogenization” that 33

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characterizes a highly institutionalized field (Powell and DiMaggio 1991:64). But this is not simply an argument about worship style as opposed to theological substance. They are opposed to the structure of the megachurch which determines the content of the activity that takes place inside those organizations. Several of my respondents quoted McLuhan’s (1964) famous dictum that “the medium is the message” when I asked them to tell me what makes their church different from one down the street. The megachurch movement occupies a highly symbolic space for people in the Emerging Church. Although very few of my respondents had attended megachurches for an extended period time, they universally viewed the megachurch as the culmination of institutionalized religion in the United States. When discussing the megachurch, they used words which placed it in the same domain as consumerism, often referring to the megachurch as “commodified.” For example, Wade, a 41 year old congregant at Calvary who had recently moved to the area explained why he sought out an Emerging Church this way: You know, the way church is done matters. I’m sure it matters to everyone, but for us it matters that it is thoughtful and not just going through the motions. I’ve been to a few megachurches when I was looking for a church home and they really, ah, they really just seemed like they were trying to sell me religion. I mean, it was all neatly packaged and ready to go. I didn’t have to think for myself, I didn’t have to create anything on my own. It was like drive-through spirituality. The whole experience had become so commodified, right down to being able to download the sermon on your way out the door. But I can see why they’re popular, for the same reasons fast food is popular. It’s convenient and they have a lot to offer for some people, just not for me.

Thus, the megachurch is, for people in the Emerging Church, not necessarily an evil or even a bad thing, but rather the thing that does not work for them. It is, as Jimmy, a pastor at Crossroads, said to me at a church run coffee shop, “the force which must be resisted.” In other words, the megachurch is the trend of magnitude, and the Emerging Church views itself as a the counter-trend which eddies against the main current. But how did this happen? How did the Emerging Church come to occupy this space on the margins of religion, successfully avoiding getting swept up in the larger trend of the megachurch movement? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to take a closer look at

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the context that gave rise to the Emerging Church. Organizational theorists have long understood that it is necessary to account for the conditions out which an organization is developed in order to understand why it exists in its current formation. Stinchcombe’s (1965) now classic organizational imprinting theory posits that organizations draw on available social, cultural and technical resources available at a given time. Organizations, then, are contingent upon their socio-historical conditions and cannot be properly understood outside of this framework. In particular, organizational structures, processes and ideologies are shaped most by these early environmental forces (Scott 1995). The Emerging Church exists as it does today precisely because of the context of its development. In the sections below, I discuss how the Emerging Church arose as a reaction against the same social forces which produced the megachurch movement. In order to place the Emerging Church in appropriate context it is important to understand that it did not develop as the first response to the inexorable pull of religious institutionalization even in the most recent form of the megachurch. Instead, it came about only after the perceived failures of other initiatives that I discuss below. This development was spurred on by several catalysts which extended far beyond the field of religion, ultimately producing a specific kind of organization with an eye toward resisting the institutional pressures by being intensely local and contextual. Rise of the Megachurch

Walking into a megachurch, one cannot help but marvel at the massive coordination of efforts it must entail to engineer a worship setting and experience which so smoothly accommodates several thousand people at a time. The self-contained ecosystem that is the modern, suburban megachurch feels more like an artist’s living rendering of an alternative future than a traditional place of worship. The most expansive megachurches offer a service for every desire. Need to drop off drycleaning? Check. Daycare? Check. Grab coffee, hang out with friends, take some computer classes, attend a support group for addiction or some other affliction? Check, check, check and check. Oh, and there’s worship, too. Spectacular worship, to borrow a term from megachurch researcher George Sanders (forthcoming a). The spectacle of the megachurch worship service is truly something to behold. Massive video screens, comfortable chairs in lieu of pews, state of the art sound and lighting systems, mobile phone apps for tithing. Everything is planned and timed to perfection, often to accommodate a television

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and/or radio production schedule which will carry the service far beyond the admittedly massive boundaries of the physical space occupied by the sanctuary itself. It is no coincidence if this sounds more like a professional sports arena than a church as many of them occupy renovated spaces abandoned by athletic teams in favor of newer, even more state of the art digs. The last three decades have seen the rise of the megachurch as a distinctive force in the U.S. religious landscape. Scott Thumma (1996), a leading researcher of megachurches, describes megachurches as congregations which are characterized by their large worship numbers (over 2000 per week) and positive, practical messages that avoid being overly theological or controversial delivered by a “spiritual entrepreneur” whose personality is indelibly printed throughout the organization. Although different in style from traditional churches, the fundamental components of the megachurch as an organization (leadership hierarchy, organizational framework, etc.) have much in common with more established religious structures such as denominations. In many ways, these large churches are simply an extension of the trend toward larger and more bureaucratic organizations in all facets of life that are part and parcel of living in a modern society (Packard and Sanders forthcoming). Although the first modern megachurches were founded in the 1950s it is during the past three decades that they have truly flourished. There are now over 1,200 congregations which qualify as a megachurch--more than double the number present in 2000 (Thumma, Travis and Bird 2005), and some estimates indicate that more Protestant Christians belong to megachurches than any other religious organization (Einstein 2008). One of the most notable characteristics of megachurches is that nearly all of them achieve their massive growth under the same leader or senior pastor (Thumma, Travis and Bird 2005). Often, the churches or congregations are unknown apart from the charismatic leader, and churchgoers frequently report attending a particular congregation because of the pastor. The archetypal megachurch pastor focuses on positive, therapeutic and “practical” messages (Ellingson 2007). Critics often point to the lack of credentials of these leaders and suggest that congregants are following a charismatic leader rather than subscribing to a belief system. People who attend these megachurches, however, reply that the church meets their spiritual needs and leaves them with a positive outlook (Roof 1999). Espousing uncontroversial messages filled with hope has made celebrities out of the most prominent evangelical pastors. Megachurch

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leaders such as Rick Warren, Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes have become common sights in the popular media and political circles, are authors of books which routinely occupy spots on bestseller lists for extended periods of time, and are well known to many people outside of their own congregations. This celebrity status is seen as consonant with the stated goals of these organizations to discover and attract new believers. From the beginning, megachurches have catered explicitly to the unchurched person who may not have any routine access to religious figures (though most members come from a church-going background) and provide worship experiences and programs which are applicable to daily life, void of an abundance of religious symbols and rituals and are largely passive in nature (Thumma 1996). It is no accident that megachurches have settled on this kind of religious “product.” Bill Hybels, the founder of Willow Creek Church in Chicago, provided the model that laid the groundwork for the massive expansion of the megachurch movement. Looking to put his education in management to use in the 1970s, he hired a marketing team to survey suburban Chicago in order to find out what people didn’t like about church. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he found that most people perceived church as boring and irrelevant to their own lives (Sanders forthcoming b). Armed with this information, he set out to develop a church that was exciting, appealing and relevant, offering a religious experience that more closely resembled the consumerist turn that increasingly structured many American’s lives throughout the second part of the 20th century (Sanders forthcoming b). Sanctuaries and worship experiences deemphasize religious language and symbols both in terms of ubiquity and prominence in order to be sensitive to “seekers” and others for whom traditional religious symbols are an impediment to engagement with God. Instead of focusing on symbols and rituals, congregants are encouraged to concentrate on the message being presented from the pulpit or “podium” as Joel Osteen steadfastly insisted on calling it in a interview with 60 Minutes in 2007. The interactions between pastor and congregation typically take place in a large auditorium or on a television set as many congregations have services that are broadcast regionally or nationally. This largely passive interaction of transmitting information from the expert to the uneducated is at the heart of the megachurch worship experience (Sanders forthcoming a). In his study of the religious habits of the baby boomer generation, Wade Clark Roof locates the rise of this consumer model to the economic boom following WWII. The relative stability and economic success of the period freed people to internalize an identity based on consumption rather than the work and save ethic

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that characterized previous generations (Roof 1999). It is no accident, then, that a form of church would rise up to take advantage of the same cultural forces which compelled the growth of an ethos of consumerism in general (Schor and Holt 2000). Aldrich (1981) conceptualizes this approach to religion as an appeal to the “felt needs” of a community which, when coupled with shrewd marketing, can be used for a congregation to achieve rapid growth. In this way the megachurch, despite being a modern phenomenon, has its roots in the 18th and 19th century American revivals. These movements utilized sophisticated marketing techniques taking advantage of the dominant communication technology of the time, newspapers, to promote large scale events that were a mixture of social event and religious ceremony to attract worshippers (Lambert 1994). These are not unlike the campaigns and strategies now employed by modern megachurches who frequently broadcast their worship services, maintain sophisticated multimedia presences on the web, and tout the church as an all-encompassing community which functions as a social space as well as a religious space (Guinness 1993; Loveland and Wheeler 2003). In the past, tent revivals attracted hundreds and sometimes thousands of people with the promise of good food and free entertainment in addition to religious teaching. Ultimately, however, these revivals left the structure and belief system of the church intact, merely providing a different venue and social context to do the same kind of work that was already going on in established congregations (Finke and Stark 1992). Indeed, many revivals were sponsored by existing, local congregations. Similarly, megachurches leave unexamined and unchallenged the implicit assumptions which underlie traditional evangelicalism. The marketing suggests a new way to practice religion, updated for a modern audience, but the religion that is being practiced is still relatively mainstream and traditional (Pritchard 1995). The service order might be non-traditional and the pastor might not have been trained in a seminary, but the message that one can only guarantee a place in the afterlife through adherence to Biblical principles regarding morality and a belief in Jesus Christ as the savior are not only unchanged, but completely unquestioned. In other words, the differences between megachurches and mainstream, traditional churches do not extend much beyond size and style. Finally, no discussion of megachurches would be complete without noting their substantial influence in political realms in addition to their stature in religious spheres. Although the movement was initially characterized as being particular to the Sun Belt, current research

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indicates the spread of megachurches to every state with the most notable recent growth located in the Midwest and northeast (Thumma 1996). Megachurch pastors typically eschew strong political stances, but their congregants are often united around a common value system which can be appealed to and mobilized. Their sheer size then makes them highly influential in political battles. These are the evangelicals so largely credited with helping George W. Bush carry the closely contested Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (Denton 2005). The megachurch can be understood as the ultimate triumph of modernity in organized religion. It is not a drastically different manifestation of church or an alternative kind of religious organization. For the most part, megachurches are simply bigger versions of the smaller congregations most of their members attended when they were growing up. Their organizational structure may be flatter, but they have not chosen to do away with hierarchy as the primary mode of organizing employees at all, and the cosmetic changes serve to mask a very traditional theology. It is important to emphasize again that this is by design, not accident. Although the nation became much more familiar with Rick Warren’s biography after he was selected to give the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration, his friendship with Peter Drucker, the well-known management expert and founder of the first MBA program who foresaw the rise to prominence of marketing and privatization, is too little remarked upon. The principles illuminated by Drucker in the for-profit world were put into direct practice by Warren and others in the field of religion (Sanders forthcoming b). Although initially intended to appeal to people who did not go to church, the success of megachurch marketing has come largely from people who already self-describe as Christian and are leaving established churches to switch to a megachurch (Chaves 2006). In order to keep up, many traditional church organizations have begun to adopt the strategies of the megachurch movement, sometimes quite unabashedly in a very explicit form of mimetic isomorphism. The vast expansion of influence of the megachurch within organized religion in the past 20 years has resulted in the adoption of their strategies and techniques by other congregations, both in and outside of the mainline denominations. The widespread use of Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church model, which has been used by over 400,000 church leaders (Purpose Driven), and Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek Association, which consists of over 11,000 member churches (Willow Creek) and hosts events which train people to the model of church development developed by Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church,

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is testament to the extent to which other churches are attempting to incorporate elements of these methods if not adopt them wholesale. The result is a religious landscape with relatively little differentiation at the organizational level. This has resulted in a homogenized field where megachurches and traditional denominations look and act very much like one another. Although they initially began as a non-denominational movement, we can now find megachurches in every major denomination. In fact, one of the fastest growing segments of organized Christianity can be found in the development of megachurches within traditional denominations (Thumma 1996). Additionally, megachurches have adopted features of traditional denominations through the implementation of satellite campuses and “franchised” congregations where sermons are piped in via satellite during the middle of the service. Because of this pervasiveness and influence, megachurches invoke reactions from people who are dissatisfied with this hyper-rationalized and commodified version of church. The Emerging Church grew out of a response to this kind of consumerist, leader driven, “seeker-sensitive” approach to church, and as we will see in the next section, these responses dramatically shaped the structure, practice and ideology of the Emerging Church. Emerging Church as a Response

The same forces that compelled the modern megachurch into existence also laid the foundations for the rise of the Emerging Church as the significant religious alternative. Just as Ellingson (2007), Twitchell (2004) and others have documented how the megachurch movement grew out of a dissatisfaction with the ability of mainline denominations to meet the needs/desires of congregants and reach the dechurched, the Emerging Church movement arose from the failure of previous attempts to capitalize on the desires of people who did not find a home in the institutional church. Three of these dissatisfactions in particular were brought up repeatedly among my respondents and are prominent in the Emerging Church literature as well when discussions turn to the religious histories and backgrounds that led people to worship in the Emerging Church. First, the house church movement challenged the institutional structure of mainstream Christianity in the U.S. Second, the “church-within-a-church” service challenged the process by which worship is done. And finally, the promise of a more individually tailored and relevant theology found in the early megachurch movement challenged existing religious ideology.

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The Emerging Church arises not out of the successes of these trends, but rather out of what my respondents viewed as the failures of these initiatives to successfully sustain a different religious experience. Furthermore, it becomes clear in listening to them that they believe that the Emerging Church represents a significant improvement over each of those previous efforts. As Hanley makes clear in the extended quote below, the perspective of people in the Emerging Church derives specifically out of previous dissatisfactions. I think it is better. I was going to say that it’s just better for me, but I don’t think that’s the extent of it. I mean, it’s more honest. We’re not trying to be anything other than what we say. But that’s not because we’re better people, it’s just that we don’t have the pressure to be any one thing in particular so we’re allowed to have that stance. You know, I’ve been to all those different churches, megachurches, special services on Sunday nights or Saturday nights designed for Gen Xers or whatever. In the end, they’re all just window dressing getting back to the same old, tired theology. So yeah, we do ritual here and we have symbols, but we call them rituals and symbols. We talk about what they mean and how those meanings have changed. We don’t present them as immutable because they’re not and they haven’t been. That’s more honest to me. So yeah, I think it’s better.

Although Hanley’s case above is somewhat uncommon in the sense that he had such a long history with many different types of organized religion, it is representative of the prevailing sentiment among my respondents. Additionally, it hints at something which is characteristic of the Emerging Church. Namely, while those other forms of church that Hanley dismisses as window dressing were primarily aimed at either attracting the unchurched or retaining the tricky demographic of 18-30 year olds that traditionally leave the church, one finds a lot of people in the Emerging Church who have substantial religious histories but who have left the church out of frustration or dissatisfaction, the so-called “dechurched.” The take-away from Hanley’s sentiments and those expressed in the paragraphs below is not a judgment on the overall quality of institutional religion but rather to establish the intentionality that my respondents report in their dissatisfaction with institutional religion. While their expressions might border on the rhetorical, it is also the case that their feelings about institutional religion have a consistency and tone that indicates genuine sentiment rather than simply rote response. In any case, these feelings are crucial to understand the history and development of the Emerging Church’s anti-institutional stance.

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Dissatisfactions

The Megahouse Church Each time I was invited to attend a worship service at a house church during my time in the field, I was struck by how these gatherings managed to be simultaneously the exact opposite of a megachurch and exactly as disorienting. Transforming an everyday room into a sacred space is, of course, part of the point, but eating potluck dishes on an overstuffed sofa surrounded by somebody else’s family pictures and children’s toys never felt any less strange to me than watching a sermon on a jumbotron in a stadium. The modern house church movement in the U.S. began in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to the same forces which undergirded the rise of the megachurch. Responding to what they saw as the harmful presence of a consumerist model in traditional churches, these small communities typically meet, as their name implies, in a member’s home around a simple, often unplanned service and meal. Eschewing hierarchical leadership for Biblical reasons, they are often identified as descendants of the Anabaptists (e.g., Quakers, Mennonites). Even if you do not believe the overly optimistic numbers put forth by the Barna Group that there are now over 30,000 house churches in the U.S. with millions of attendees on a given week (Barna 2005), there is no denying that there is a sizeable number of people worshiping in this way on a regular basis in the U.S. Time Magazine profiled the movement in 2006 noting that the appeal of flexible resources was a major draw for participants. While buildings typically consume around 75% of a congregation’s resources, house churches manage to spend only 10% of offerings on non-service related activities (Healy 2006). This anti-consumerist, service oriented stance appears in the Emerging Church as well in the form of being “missional,” which I discuss in detail below. Sociologically, their focus on shared leadership, adherence to democratic or consensus principles and avoidance of bureaucracy marks them as an alternative organization (Rothschild-Whitt 1979). This kind of structure, while effective at countering bureaucratic tendencies, sacrifices the potential for growth and influence (Rothschild and Whitt 1986). Diane explained this tension succinctly when she remarked about her former house church congregation that “we were really close, but at the end of the day, we didn’t do anything. All our energy went into sustaining the church for ourselves.” The resources that might have been devoted to working in the community or expanding membership were consumed by the day to day operations of a congregation without any institutional supports.

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Many Emerging Church communities begin as house churches but move into other spaces simply out of concern for the people charged with making space for a living room full of people for an indeterminate amount of time each week. This resource burden can lead to instability for these communities, making it difficult to get any work done outside of what is necessary to support the congregation. This is ultimately a big issue for people whose religion is heavily influenced by a strong commitment to social justice issues. In the vernacular of the Emerging Church, this is known as “being missional” (Bielo 2011). The concept of being missional is complex, carrying a very nuanced meaning among Emerging Church adherents, and its’ importance can hardly be overstated. On the one hand, it indicates an evangelical stance, a desire to bring a religious message to other people. However, it is an evangelical stance that develops as an alternative to traditional forms of evangelism which focuses on witnessing and conversion. To be missional, for people in the Emerging Church, means to be involved in the day to day life of a community. One of the things that characterize the Emerging Church both in their own writings and in my interviews is this desire to be a part of a very local community. Often, this was conceptualized as a specific neighborhood within a larger city, sometimes as specific as a few square blocks. Bielo points out that being missional “means seriously cultivating relationships-not before or after a conversion attempt, but in place of it” (Bielo 2009:226). My respondents who had had some form of seminary or religious education would often link this concept of missionality to the liberation theology concept of solidarity. Jimmy, the pastor at Crossroads, explained it this way The Word really has value not only to people’s lives but to communities and in that sense we talk about being missional at Crossroads and that’s what that really means to us. But churches can be missional in the suburbs. Missional is not an urban thing or overseas thing. It’s something that is more far reaching and more generic, more a part of everyday life in a community, than ah, sometimes what it’s thought of. It’s more about being in solidarity with a particular group of people and living out that message to really impact our small area of the world.

The traditional house church lacks both this ideological position and the structure to coordinate efforts and resources and leverage extensive networks to act out this missionality on a large-scale or even at the neighborhood level. Thus, the house church and the Emerging Church have a mutual affinity for one another and it is not uncommon to find

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people who attend both, where the house church functions as a religious small group, performing many of the tasks of a set of friends or even to find house churches that self-describe as Emerging. It would be incorrect, however, to suggest that the two are synonymous for one another. Even Emerging house churches tend to be networked together within the same geographical area. However, the house church arrangement does not appeal as much to those people who understand the application of their religious beliefs through the lens of local, missional work. Where the rational bureaucracies in the institutional church proved to be stifling and alienating, the house churches demonstrated an inability to be relevant and affect change despite large overall numbers. So rather than attempting to come up with another organizational structure, some people decided that it was the very reliance on one structure itself which was the problem. Eric, a member at Fellowship, sums up the sentiments of several of my respondents when he remarked that “We’ve all seen the failure of large scale organizations, but we’re not ready to give up the advantages of a coordinated effort. Many of us really see this way of doing church as the way to move forward, not just as an alternative, but as a better, more authentic way of doing church and we want to promote that.” Eric’s point echoes Hanley’s above and shows that for many, the Emerging Church, by its nature, is a critique of institutional church, not a separate and equal model. These people who resist the structure of the megachurch then, are not anti-bureaucracy or anti-hierarchy per se, they are not proponents of alternative organizations or cooperative models, and they are not anarchists, advocating no structure. Rather, they are attempting to avoid any one of these designations by employing all or some of these depending on the situation at hand. The result is a church which does not appear to be all that different from the dominant megachurch model at first glance. Operating more like a megahouse church, if you walk into any one of these services you are likely to encounter something very similar to what is going on in most institutional churches. The difference lies in the experience over time. These congregations are in a constant state of flux, utilizing rituals and elements from multiple sources depending on the task to be accomplished whether that task is liturgical, ecclesiastical or organizational. Evangelical Pragmatism A second source of dissatisfaction and influence arises from what Bader-Saye (2006) conceptualizes as evangelical pragmatism. One of the most widespread attempts to make traditional, mainstream religion

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appealing to young people in the latter part of the 20th century was through the development of a weekly service with contemporary music and a reformed, relaxed liturgy operating within an already established congregation. These services do away with the organ in favor of the praise band, banishing the old hymnals with a preference for projectors. Many of these worship elements have proved so successful that they are now a part of worship in the Emerging Church and institutional church alike. In many ways, making religion more appealing by changing the way worship is done is commensurate with what megachurches were already doing, meeting the needs of people in order to attract them to the religion. Certainly the candles, rock music and coffee shop feel of these “church-within-a-church” worship experiences, while different, were not typically viewed as dangerous or sacrilegious in any way (Kimball 2003).1 In fact, many of these worship services were borne out of an already established denominational congregation or megachurch that provided financial and spiritual covering as well as meeting space, publicity and other resources. These alternative services pride themselves on meeting the unchurched “where they are at” culturally rather than preaching a message of lifestyle change (Tomlinson 2003). Whereas traditional, mainstream churches implicitly require members to either change the ways in which they engage the secular world or actively construct separate identities for sacred and secular spaces, these groups claimed to offer a religious space where this division was erased (Pagitt 2005). Operating on a “come as you are” ethos, these services offered an alternative to the pious character that pervades most mainstream religious services including megachurches. However, many people who went to these services agreed that while they might be better in some ways than the institutionalized church, they were still not being fulfilled (Bader-Saye-2006). These services quickly became just another manifestation of the same values embodied by the megachurches and other evangelical traditions; they were simply a different vehicle for delivering an unaltered message. Bader-Saye continues the discussion of the link between the megachurch and “revivalism” when he writes that these services continue trends within American evangelicalism going back to the Great Awakenings. From the tent preaching of John Wesley and George Whitfield to the televangelists of the 21st century, evangelicals have long believed that the simple message of salvation was amenable to any medium. Assuming Christianity is constituted by a core of

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unchanging beliefs and values, these evangelicals imagine it can be repackaged in new cultural forms without changing the content. When such Evangelical Pragmatists engage with postmodern culture, it becomes just another means of packaging the gospel for a new generation (Bader-Saye 2006:13).

For the people who eventually ended up comprising the Emerging Church, dissatisfaction with church did not disappear with these pragmatic approaches, and their concerns were still not being addressed adequately in these kinds of communities. Instead, many began to see them as harmful, simply disguising a system that is inherently problematic, making it more appealing without addressing the deep rooted inadequacies. Drane (2006:6-7) writes that “there was no room for theological questioning or experimentation, and when the noise of praise bands had subsided many activists in this scene found themselves physically exhausted and spiritually under-nourished.” This group of people would leave the institutionalized church and, in some cases, form their own congregations as Dan Kimball (2003), an Emerging Church pastor, discusses in his 2003 book The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations that attempts to articulate the early momentum of the Emerging Church movement around worship style. It was partially because these efforts to challenge and question long held assumptions and structures were met with such resistance that the structural and ideological responses to the megachurch arose in the first place. This early experience of focusing on changing the process of doing church left many, including my respondents, thinking that perhaps the particular method for doing church does not matter as much as the logic which underlies that process. Jessica, a congregant at Calvary, explained that her previous church experiences had led her to seek a new way of doing church. You know, I’ve been to a lot of different churches, Vineyard, Charismatic, Methodist, Orthodox, all kinds. And really, at the end of the day, they’re all basically the same. I come and do what I’m told, but there’s no ability for me to actually change or shape anything. The church is the same with or without me. And when I would have an idea and try and change things, well don’t even get me started on how hard that was. Every church just has the way they want it done. It’s not like that here.

After witnessing the attempts of the megachurch to reform traditional church liturgy and then, in turn, the “church-within-a-church” service to

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update that liturgy even more, some became convinced that the problem did not lie in the implementation of one liturgy as opposed to another, but rather in the selection of one liturgy above all others. This is a subtle but profound difference. If one thinks the problem lies not in the selection of an object or set of rituals but rather in the act of selecting itself, then this has vast implications for how an organization is structured with regard to decision making and authority (Packard 2011). Instead of relying on an institutionalized organizational form which produces and reproduces taken for granted power relationships, an effort must be made to have processes which intentionally avoid those routines and undermines concentrations of authority. Disentangled Doctrines The final, and perhaps most deeply rooted, response to the megachurch is based on ideology. Despite the fact that Martin Luther’s questions to the Roman Catholic Church sparked the birth of Protestantism, mainline Protestant congregations have rarely been welcoming of any serious investigations by its members. In fact, the “seeker” in the “seekersensitive” identity that so many megachurches claim refers to someone searching for meaning in his/her own life, not someone seeking a theological or ideological conversation. The belief system has already been decided upon; it is up to the individual if he/she chooses to adhere to it. Additionally, the focus of these belief systems on individual morals and values as opposed to broader social concerns of justice and human rights further turned away the people who would go on to make-up the Emerging Church (Ganiel 2006). It is precisely this lack of discussion and conversation, the lack of potential for change, that frustrated so many people in the second half of the 1900s (Roof 1999). At the same time that many congregations grew exponentially by offering a ready-made theology, there arose counterparts who rejected this belief system in exchange for a “do-ityourself” belief system. Indeed the number of people claiming to be “spiritual” but not “religious” rose dramatically during this time period (Roof 1999). The idea that one person might be qualified to provide theological answers for hundreds or thousands of people whom he/she has not met does not sit well with these people (Packard 2011). Bielo (2011) has rightfully pointed out that this skepticism arises from a disdain for the systematic theology that laid the foundation for so much of the modern, fundamentalist approaches found among conservative evangelicals. My respondents indicated this same distaste for an objective, knowable theology, often deriding specific systematic theologians by name (e.g., Charles Hodge, Paul Tillich) during the

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course of our interviews. Instead, it is seen as not only incumbent upon each person to discern these insights for him/herself, but also impossible that it could be done effectively any other way. Gibbs and Bolger (2005), theologians who uncritically examined the commonalities among self-defining Emerging Church congregations, discovered similar things about the Emerging Church and theology, namely that churchgoers viewed any relationship to a higher power as shaped by an individual’s unique history and experiences. Therefore, the idea that someone else might be able to provide these answers for any individual because of particular training or credential, is implausible. Their evaluation is supported by my own data. William, the pastor at Faith church, explained that worship does not occupy the central place in their community when he told me that What we like to think of our gatherings as is a time and place where we come together to corporately express our individual relationships with God. And that relationship is one that other people can help you with, and that’s what we’re all here to do, but ultimately it’s between you and God.

This is not to suggest that these people shun community. In fact, doing the kind of work necessary to resist institutionalized ideologies requires the support of others. However, they are typically careful to avoid organizations where the underlying ideology is predefined and systematized. Brett, a congregant at Crossroads, put it this way I’ve met all kinds of people who are associated with the Emerging Church in some way, and I love that diversity, how everyone is invited to the conversation even if we aren’t always the best at making sure they come. I especially like that, as a whole, we don’t shut down disagreements, at least not in my experience. I will say though that if you don’t like it when people disagree with you, then you probably won’t be real happy here.

From an organizational standpoint, the notion that ideologies are continually negotiated by all members is the exact antithesis of institutionalization. However, one should not get the idea that people in the Emerging Church do not believe in anything or that their theology is subjective as opposed to systematic. This is the criticism most often leveled at the Emerging Church and it belies an uninformed position. I discuss this point at length in the next chapter, but for now it is enough to understand that the dissatisfaction that my respondents indicated with the ideologies they encountered in their previous religious homes had

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nothing to do with the specific theological tenets and everything to do with the way those tenets were presented and arrived upon. Disaffiliated Christians: The Dechurched

These experiences led many people to opt out of organized religion altogether. Dissatisfied with the attempts of institutional religion to reform itself, and seeing no other viable alternative, some religious people, many of my respondents among them, simply chose not to be a part of any organized religious group. Many of them have found a home in the Emerging Church. United not so much by theology or a common religious history and understanding but by a general sense that traditional religion left them unfulfilled, they turned to this relatively new form of Christianity which promised a different way of doing church and more often than not, in their experience, delivered on that promise. The Emerging Church has largely been able to retain its appeal while eschewing, for the most part, the kind of conformity that theories of isomorphism posit is necessary for organizational success because they attract so many of the dechurched. Rather than being pushed toward increasing efficiency, individual congregations and the movement in general seems to thrive on a lack of efficiency. Instead of trying to pack as many people into a worship service as possible on a given Sunday, people in the Emerging Church steadfastly refuse to even count how many people show up to a service. And therein, of course, lays the appeal of the Emerging Church. While the pressures to institutionalize are great, the desire to avoid routines and taken for granted processes is more appealing to this particular group of people. Specifically, the Emerging Church finds itself as a home for the dechurched, the people who have left organized religion precisely because of dissatisfaction with what they perceive as the overly institutional elements in mainstream religion. The term “dechurched” has received little academic attention and is a group certainly worthy of its own full-scale study, but it is relatively common parlance among religious practitioners in general and within the Emerging Church in particular. Although there has been no attempt to quantify the dechurched population, well over half of my respondents fit the description. Additionally, even though I did not ask about the topic explicitly, people often brought up the concept in our interviews. One Emerging Church member even connected the dechurched with the very survival and appeal of the Emerging Church in our conversation about the broader Emerging Church movement.

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One interesting observation, I went to several of these conferences early on and all the people there were Emerging Church pastors, and as I talked to some of these people a lot of them came out of bad experiences in the church where they were. And I made the comment to them I said “You know what, if it wasn’t for a number of churches treating a situation bad or just bad things happening I’m not sure if the Emerging Church would be around.” And nobody disagreed with me. It just seemed like a lot of hurt people. People who perhaps didn’t find all the answers they were looking for where they were and weren’t encouraged to seek them but instead were just told “This is the way it is. Don’t ask any more questions.”

As we see in Tony’s point above, the dechurched are rarely people who leave organized religion due to theological concerns or disagreements. Indeed, those people readily find homes in other sectors of institutionalized religion. Additionally, the dechurched do not include people who simply lack a church home. In the way the term is commonly used, it refers specifically to those people who have made a conscious decision to leave institutional religion altogether typically after a number of bad experiences either with other congregants, church leaders or disillusionment with the mission of the organization. Melinda explains that the self-centered focus of her old church is really what caused her to seek out alternatives: I really have only ever been to one other church in my life, but I had been going to it for longer than I can remember. I mean, there’s pictures up there of me as a baby. And then, after being involved heavily really for a number of years, it dawned on me that the only people we were serving were other congregants. It’s like, the church had grown to the point to where the church itself just consumed all of our resources, all of our time, all of our energy, most of our money, even. And I just thought, I remember thinking very clearly, I don’t think God wants me to be putting together another youth and family ski trip over Thanksgiving break. And that was really it for me. It was like an epiphany moment. I tried for a while to change things because I was so committed to the place, but I think I knew in my heart of hearts that it wasn’t going to happen. I mean, you build this “thing” and it just takes on a life of its own. Feeding that animal is not really what I thought church should be, and when there wasn’t a way to change it or fix it, I really had no choice but to leave. I mean, for my own spiritual survival, I had to leave.

The closest thing we have to understanding the dechurched in the sociology of religion is rational choice theory which posits that people assess the costs and benefits of belonging to religious groups in a more

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or less rational way (Young 1997). When the costs outweigh the benefits, they will choose to leave the group and find another that offers a better exchange of resources. However, the dechurched cannot exactly be understood in this way. The dechurched are people who are fundamentally drawn to be a part of an organized group of religious people. Theoretically, there is no price too high to pay, but the benefits have to be in place as well. Thus, the rational-choice theory literature is filled with conversations about how churches attempt to strike the right balance between strictness and liberalness both with regard to theology and membership requirements (Bruce 1999). The Emerging Church, on the other hand, does not so much wade into these choppy waters as it does avoid them altogether by attempting to chart a different route. The dechurched people who attend Emerging Church congregations tend to be people who were turned off not by the theological or membership requirements of their previous church. Indeed, most of the people I spoke with recounted long histories with at least periods of heavy involvement in one or more religious organizations. Additionally, none of my respondents felt like the congregations they had been a part of had nothing to offer them socially or spiritually. Quite the contrary, in fact, as several people discussed the very difficult and painful decisions to leave their previous churches similar to the account that Chad, a 26 year old congregant at Crossroads, related to me. I left my old church before I even knew this place existed, that’s how fed up I was with the whole thing. It was hard, because you find out who your true friends are. It’s not like I was ostracized or anything, it’s just that being involved in a church can be so consuming if you let it, and that’s what happened to me and my friends. Since I wasn’t doing those things anymore, there just wasn’t time for us. I mean, what’s weird about it is that lack of openness is exactly what I didn’t like about the church when I was there, and then it was happening to me. I struggled for a while, but it really confirmed my decision.

While this was certainly not the case for everyone (some people found it quite easy to abandon old congregations) it was not an uncommon tale. Universally, however, the dechurched in the Emerging Church reported that they left their old congregations because they were dissatisfied with the way the church was done. Multiple people expressed religious histories similar to Harmony who recounts how she progressively moved toward more and more uninstitutionalized versions of organized religion before landing at an Emerging Church.

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I guess this is really the end of a long journey, although I didn’t realize it at the time. In the past I would be at a place for a while and at first it would be new and interesting and full of potential, but after a while, usually not too long, I began to figure out the patterns and routines and that lack of creativity and imagination just really got me down, so I’d move on to the next thing. That hasn’t happened here and this is the longest I’ve been at the same church.

That is to say, these people are dissatisfied with the organization of religion. Even when theology is cited as a reason for leaving the institutional church, it is rarely over a disagreement about a particular position. More often theological dissatisfaction arose when my respondents perceived that theological agreement was an impediment to creating a more inclusive community. Much like the sentiments expressed above, Chris indicated that the exclusionary practices of his old congregation are what ultimately pushed him out the door. Chris: If you say what makes us distinctive is our theology, then you’re going to come to a point where it’s a game you can’t win, because either you or somebody else will find a theological quibble that you have with somebody else and you will perpetuate that divorce. So, it’s an absolute. It happened in every congregation I was ever a part of until this one. We don’t do that here. It’s probably because this place is filled with a bunch of people who had that same frustration so we’re not about to do that to each other, you know? Interviewer: So what does make you distinctive, if not your theology? Chris: I think, really, it’s the community. I know it sounds cliché to say that everyone is unique, but what I think helps us to move beyond that cliché is that we really focus on what we as group have to offer our little corner of the world. We trust that our individual faith lives will be nourished along the way with help from one another. We would rather spend time doing, than spend time believing, if that makes any sense…At the last church I went to before here, this was years ago now, they just seemed to put up more and more walls and barriers so that it got to the point that to just have a simple meal in the church with some friends or a Bible study group had to go through like three committees. It just wasn’t worth it anymore.

Chris is really making it clear that being a member of the dechurched population is not just a part of his past, but influences how he understands his current church experience as well. As his comments make clear, it’s impossible for him to understand his current church experiences without referencing his religious past. Earlier in the

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interview, when I asked him about his church history, he indicated that although he has always considered himself to be a religious person, he left the church for a long time because he felt like the churches he had been to did not have anything to offer him, and in fact, were keeping him from doing the work he thought was important. Contrary to the rational choice models of religious behavior, these disaffiliated Christians do not put forth a story of opting in or out based on the right combination of requirements and compensators. Rather, these people are looking for a specific way to organize religion regardless of the costs and benefits.2 In fact, one of the things that characterizes the Emerging Church movement is the sheer variety of combinations of the traditional “costs” and “benefits.” In the congregations I visited I witnessed startlingly different theological stances (including relatively circumscribed roles for women and openly gay partners participating in the administration of worship services) along with various combinations of requirements and obligations. Though additional data might prove otherwise, to date no systematic arrangement within the Emerging Church has arisen. Indeed, it was not uncommon for me to find multiple arrangements within a particular congregation. The Emerging Church thus appeals to a distinct pool of people who desire to be a part of a religious group, but who are not going to be a part of mainstream Christian congregations. While theories of isomorphism would suggest that they would have to conform to dominant standards in order to be successful in competing for new members and signaling legitimacy, they find that they are not actually competing for the same members as large institutional churches. In fact, it is the inefficiency of the institutional church at meeting the needs of some people which has facilitated and sustained a population of people interested in the Emerging Church in the first place. The lack of institutionalization and efficiency is a positive factor in this case, rather than a death sentence (see chapter 5). Social Environment

It would be incorrect to suggest that the dissatisfactions in the previous pages necessitated the rise of the Emerging Church. Certainly, they provided the necessary conditions, but dissatisfaction with institutionalized religion is nothing new. Why, then, did those dissatisfactions result in the current formulation of the Emerging Church? The answer to this question lies largely outside of the field of religion and helps to connect the development of the Emerging Church to larger social developments. In this section I highlight some of the

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main forces identified by my data, the popular literature about the Emerging Church, and theories of religious change which brought the reactions discussed above together in an identifiable movement of resistance. Three developments in particular, one technical, one philosophical, and one social helped give shape to what has become the present day Emerging Church movement. The development of the internet provided a technology and forum which allowed people in the inherently marginalized Emerging Church to come together without an overarching organization. Additionally, the popularity of postmodern philosophy and criticism especially regarding authority and consumerism, provided the framework through which traditional views and beliefs could be reinterpreted. Finally, the general distrust in social institutions and authority figures that developed in the U.S. over the last part of the 20th century played a major role in shaping the organizational structure of early Emerging Churches. The Internet

The rise of the Emerging Church corresponds with the development of online communication in the 1990s and 2000s, and much of the activity of the Emerging Church occurs in cyberspace in the form of blogs and message boards. Indeed, the importance of the worldwide web for the development of the Emerging Church can hardly be overstated. Drane writes that [t]he Emerging Church would certainly not be what it now is, were it not for the worldwide web that has facilitated the organic growth of an international network of individuals and groups who are exchanging ideas about it on a daily basis. Indeed, without ready access to this form of instant communication, the Emerging Church may not exist at all (Drane 2006:9 emphasis added).

My interviews substantiate this claim as even respondents who considered themselves only marginally interested in the broader Emerging Church phenomenon could provide a list of regularly accessed blogs and websites. My own experience at a conference of Emerging Church leaders and practitioners drove home this point for me as three different attendees were webcasting the sessions on their own websites for anyone to access, and no fewer than 14 of the attendees posted entries to their blog about the week (often during the sessions). This had the effect of bringing a larger number of voices into the conversation as

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attendees would frequently repeat questions posed by blog readers during the conference. People responding to traditional church structures have also used the internet to affect the way they worship. Several websites offer some form of online worship either through relatively traditional means like videocasts and podcasts or through more creative methods such as emergingchurch.info’s lava lamp prayer, embody.co.uk’s online labyrinths, or even social gatherings using avatars at tallskinnykiwi.com. Additionally, online databases of Emerging Church congregations (e.g., relevantmagazine.com, ginkworld.net) help connect people with worship communities, a crucial resource for a relatively small and difficult to define group. These innovations, combined with the methods of information generation and dissemination are among some of the first efforts at forming a religious community that spans geographical boundaries without utilizing traditional organizational structure. They are attempts to establish communities of experience rather than communities of doctrine. When it works, people are united by common, shared interactions, rather than adherence to specific religious dogma even when they are physically isolated. Thus, Emerging Church gatherings and conferences are frequently punctuated by enthusiastic greetings between people who are intimately familiar with one another but have never actually met in person. Popular Postmodernism

Equally as important as the technological innovations of the internet is a philosophy which allows a critique of institutionalized church while providing future spiritual direction through the recovery of ancient practices. Bielo (2009) refers to this ancient-future orientation of the Emerging Church and argues that it is a defining trait. Worship elements such as prayer labyrinths, meditation, multi-sensory worship and participative “sermons” all contribute to an “ancient-future” liturgical stance that informs the spirit of the entire movement (Bielo 2009). The development of postmodern philosophy in the second half of the 20th century was crucial in the development of this ideology. Specifically, Lyotard’s (1984) conception of postmodernity as signifying “incredulity toward the metanarrative” was especially influential along with the critiques of authorship, authority and consumer society provided by the French deconstructionists and literary theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard. References to these authors and ideas were common in my interviews. For example, in his discussion of the authority of anyone to

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alter church liturgies, Fred noted that “we’ve all read enough Derrida and Foucault to be aware of the death of the author, and that inevitably plays into how we reinterpret these worship elements.” However, these ideas were engaged with in a very particular way, not so much as academic theory than as social fact. I quote Bader-Saye at length below, because his description of the relationship between the Emerging Church and postmodernism is succinct and supported by both my observations and interviews. Overall, the emerging conversation tends to be more effective at engaging postmodernity in pragmatic ways than in reflecting on it theoretically. Emergents generally define the postmodern ethos in terms of a cluster of cultural transitions that have had most impact on younger generations – things like a return to mystery (with a renewed interest in spiritual practices and medieval mysticism), a hunger for spirituality (even if overlaid with ‘new age’ assumptions and do-ityourself religion), new models of networked communities (via Internet, cell phones and increased mobility), a desire to find roots in tradition (in contrast to the modern suspicion of tradition), and a yearning to encounter God through image, ritual and sacrament (in contrast to highly word-centered and often iconoclastic modernist forms of Christianity). In other words, the demise, or decline, of modernity has in many ways opened a path to retrieve things premodern and to regain the integrity of a church long compromised by its partnership with power (Bader-Saye 2006:16).

Although many people likely gain their first exposure to these ideas in humanities courses in college, there has also arisen an entire genre of books devoted to introducing the reader to postmodern philosophy. My interviewees commonly mentioned that these short “primers” (e.g., Stanley Grenz’s A Primer on Postmodernism) are frequently passed around among friends or, as is more often the case, listed as recommended reading on personal blogs. These texts highlight and pay particular attention to issues of identity, history and culture, and they typically spend a good deal of time discussing subjectivity vs. objectivity. Aside from these secular sources, there is also a rapidly expanding subsection of religious writing on postmodernity (e.g., James Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to Church). These texts take up the idea of the grand narrative as it relates to the most basic grand narrative of all, religion, and grapple with how to maintain faith without resorting to subjectivity. The struggle with absolute truths has proved to be the most fruitful area for discussion provoking both condemnations of postmodernity and defenders of the philosophy (Greer 2003).

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These ideas are so foundational for my respondents that they frequently reported that their identity was inseparable from how they understood postmodern philosophy. After spending any amount of time in the Emerging Church it becomes clear that, as a collective, people in the Emerging Church are, as Harrold (2006:79) observes, “selfconsciously postmodern.” Over a dozen of the people I talked with made the identity statement “I am postmodern.” Understanding this particular version of postmodern philosophy then is not simply a way to access a set of ivory tower ideas but rather is a way to understand themselves and the world around them better. The insights from theorists are often implemented in a way that transcends the traditional divide between theory and practice. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the their presence on the web would embrace non-linearity while eschewing traditional authority structures and structuring in widespread production as much as possible. Public Distrust

Around the same time that postmodern philosophy was being embraced, sociologists began to notice that people were increasingly distrustful of social institutions in all forms. In their seminal work The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor and Government in the Public Mind, Lipset and Schneider (1987) documented how confidence in social institutions in general declined after peaking in the early 1960s. Although their analysis focuses on the government, for-profit businesses and labor unions, they identified a trend which is present in other social institutions as well. In religion, for example, the drop in confidence was so noticeable as to be advanced as a reconceptualization of the secularization thesis (Chaves 1994). Due in part to the same forces that caused the decline in confidence for government and financial institutions in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Watergate, savings and loan crisis), and in part to their own, unique problems at the same time such as the televangelist scandals, people are increasingly dissatisfied with their religious leaders. Two empirical studies in particular confirm these assertions. Kleiman and Ramsey (1996:85) examined data collected over a 22 year period and concluded that there has been “a dramatic drop in confidence in religious leaders.” These findings remain across demographic groups. Additionally, in comparisons of religious and other institutions, they find that confidence in religious institutions had dropped most precipitously (Kleiman and Ramsey 1996). Hoffmann (1998) picks up on Kleiman and Ramsey’s study and utilizes a more sophisticated data set to explore effects both

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within and between cohorts. He finds that “there is an overall trend from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s indicating declining confidence in religious institutions” (Hoffmann 1998:338). This decline in confidence was especially salient for younger cohorts such as those that make up the bulk of the Emerging Church (Drane 2006). In his exploration of the foundations of the Emerging Church, Lings remarks that the “fact that all institutions are now regarded with considerable suspicion makes the past dominant model of Church as institution even less compelling than it once was” (Lings 2006:105). While the current dissatisfaction is probably not rooted in the televangelist and savings and loan incidents of the 1980s, the Catholic sex abuse scandals and corporate fraud cases of the late 1990s and 2000s have more than picked up the slack. The result is a twofold distaste for traditional religion and the corporate form. Tony, a 27 year old former youth minister and current blogger who writes about the Emerging Church regularly, grew increasingly uncomfortable with the church where he worked. The pastor was very upfront about calling himself the CEO of the church…and for a long time now we’ve been borrowing models and practices from the business world to try and become more successful, but I think it’s pretty apparent just from Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, and now with the subprime scandals, that a lot of the practices in the business world are incompatible with how the church should run, and we should not absorb that culture like we’ve been doing.

Tony went on to note that these frustrations ultimately led him to leave his job as a youth director and seek out non-traditional ways of doing church including both house and Emerging Churches. Tony’s narrative of disillusionment and turning away from institutional church and corporate governing structures is not uncommon. Harrold (2006) notes that such stories are a dominant characteristic of popular press publications about the Emerging Church. Indeed, such “deconversion” experiences are often seen as a key feature of the late modern or postmodern religious experience (Barbour 1994). These three simultaneous and mutually reinforcing phenomenon, one technological, one philosophical and one social, played important roles in bringing together the various strands of dissatisfaction that grew out of people’s experiences with institutional church in the late 20th century. The Emerging Church exists as it does today precisely because of the effect of these social developments. Although it is quite possible that something approximating the Emerging Church movement would

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have arisen without these elements in place, it is certain that it would have taken a much different shape and form. Conclusion

The Emerging Church has arisen as a specific kind of organization because of the unique forces which shaped religion in particular and society in general over the latter half of the 20th century. It is clearly conceptualized as a response to highly institutionalized forms of religion and as a critique of the megachurch specifically. What becomes most clear in looking at the historical context of the development of the Emerging Church is that the movement is filled with people who have long histories with institutional church. Their dissatisfactions arise from personal experience rather than theoretical understanding. More than anything, this explains their reluctance to adopt a singular organizational form or strategy. Surveying the options available to them, one could easily understand why the Emerging Church, with its anti-institutional stance, appeals to them. Settling on an organizational structure, religious ideology or standard operating procedures would be counter to the very identity of what it means to be “emerging.” 1 Or at least, they were not viewed this way until they were adopted to the point of cliché by the Emerging Church. 2 Of course, it could be argued that the benefit of “right” organization is worth any price to these people, as evidenced by their decision to belong. However, this has not been shown to be the salient variable at work in the macro-level analysis of rational choice theory. Additionally, such an approach would reduce rational choice theory to charges of reification wherein no religious decision can conceivably fall beyond the scope of rational choice theory.

3 Sustaining Permanently Unsettled Lives

If the Emerging Church movement is somewhat difficult to pin down from the standpoint of academics and outsiders, one can only imagine how much trouble it must be for people who have spent the better part of their professional lives working in traditional congregations. It for this reason that gatherings and conferences of Emerging Church leaders and pastors typically include some kind of open-forum Q&A with pastors and others from the local religious community. Thus, time and again, a subsection of a relatively small group of Emerging Church pastors and church planters find themselves seated in a row of chairs, introduced, often with much protest on their part, as “experts” on the Emerging Church. After the necessary preambles to try and make clear to the audience that they do not think of themselves as authorities on the subject (because no such thing could exist in their opinion) the questions begin. They are direct and challenging without being terribly contentious, and it is clear that there is much hand wringing about the Emerging Church within established religion. Toward the beginning of one of these meetings, in a nondescript fellowship hall in a Baptist church in Houston, a Presbyterian pastor asked the inevitable question, “What is the Emerging Church?” There was a heavy silence in the room, and the panelists shifted uneasily in their chairs. I had seen enough of these things to understand what was going to happen next and thus, why they were hesitant to answer the question. The inquisitor had, knowingly or otherwise, presented the proverbial apple to the group gathered. As a researcher, this was a particularly interesting moment for me because in a lot of ways it was a form of natural check on the things these people had been expressing to me privately. Would they be as beholden to their anti-dogmatic stance in practice as they had articulated to me in theoretical terms? 61

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There is great power to be gained and exerted by defining a group and its boundaries. Such a definition is inherently an advancement of an ideology, and this gathering had just been offered that power, if even on a relatively small scale. After a long pause, a long-time pastor of an Emerging Church answered: “Not to be rude, but that’s the question we can’t ask. If we spend longer than one minute discussing it, then we’re done as a movement.” Several other people indicated their agreement, stating that the Emerging Church is built on differences rather than similarities. The panelists understood how unsatisfactory their answer would be, and true to form, the questioner followed up with a few more attempts to get them to agree on either what counted as an Emerging Church or what could be successfully ruled out. This line of questioning, too, was met with stalemate. Jeremy, a missionary from Europe, in a moment of near exasperation finally ended the line of questioning by interrupting the pastor and saying, “You ask ‘What’s off the table?’ when it comes to what counts as the Emerging Church and I would say ‘The table.’ Because to use the table metaphor assumes that we are trying to create an Emerging Church orthodoxy, and I’m not really interested in doing that.” Jeremy went on to say that the “Emerging Church is not about being something it’s about always changing.” His point is that asking what the emerging church “is,” is sort of a strange question. He believes that it is ultimately dangerous to say what it is because as soon as that happens, the group becomes static rather than dynamic. It moves from becoming, to being, a situation which is not conducive to avoiding routines, patterns of behavior and institutionalized ideologies. In my own follow-up with Jeremy afterward, I asked what seemed like the obvious question to me, Why? Why not create an Emerging Church orthodoxy? Wouldn’t it be easier? Jeremy’s response, indicating a pretty sophisticated understanding of organizational dynamics, was that any orthodoxy would inevitably lead to less openness and diversity and that they had been “working pretty explicitly to avoid anything that would lead down that path.” The belief system of people in the Emerging Church can hardly be classified as cohesive. However, the commitment of congregants to a spirit of sustained conversation and questioning about normally taken for granted religious elements contributes to a group ideology which refuses to be nailed down. What Jeremy is describing above is a commitment to maintaining what sociologist Ann Swidler (1986) refers to as “unsettled lives” and it is an important and intentional strategy employed by people in the Emerging Church in order to avoid dogmatization. In this way, parts of religious life that, once examined,

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are not typically subject to ongoing investigation in mainstream Christianity (e.g., the meaning of communion) are intentionally subjected to continuous negotiation and interpretation in the Emerging Church. In the sections below, I explore this ideology and its effectiveness for creating and sustaining resistance to the institutionalization of a dominant organizational ideology. Organizational Ideologies

An ideology, or system of ideas, has the ability to effectively constrain organizational behavior when articulated in a way that allows for replication, because articulated ideologies are the mechanisms by which sets of ideas become institutionalized in an organization (e.g., mission statements, rituals, creeds, etc.). They are inherently linked with power that privileges some voices and silences others (Weiss and Miller 1987). This is precisely the force that the panelists were resisting in their refusal to offer a definition of the Emerging Church. They were declining to offer an Emerging Church ideology. What makes an organizational ideology an especially important component of institutionalization is that it inherently limits options and circumscribes possibilities. Although not the case with the Emerging Church, this is often viewed as a good thing. Promoting a coherent ideology allows for consumers to be able to readily locate a particular identity with a company, and firms work hard to make this happen (e.g., Disneyland is the “Happiest Place on Earth”). Organizational ideologies also work internally, at least to some extent, to help govern an organization that has grown to a point beyond which no single individual can exert a tremendous amount of control (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Powell and DiMaggio 1991). For complex organizations to be successful, people must work toward the same organizational goals with as little oversight as possible. A sense of corporate identity serves to ensure that everyone is on the same page (Bart 1996; Cohen, March and Olsen 1972; Shafritz and Ott 2001). Friedland and Alford (1991) argue that these ideologies are governed by their own institutional logic. For religion, the dominant institutional logic is a drive toward transcendent truth (Friedland and Alford 1991). All organizational activity is justified ostensibly as a effort toward the discovery or communication of this truth. Stout and Cormode (1998) explain that institutional logics are the foundation upon which organizational cultures are built.

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They become the master rules lying behind all interaction within that institutional order. Without a logic of transcendent truth the Christian religion falls apart, just as the logic of accumulation and commodification regulates commerce within capitalism. Individuals acting within the domains of religion or capitalism inhale these logics with as little thought as taking a breath” (Stout and Cormode 1998:71).

Religious rituals become the framework that communicate these complex ideologies in ways that are easily accessible. The organizational culture of a religious group is largely built around these highly symbolic, shared activities. For most people, religious rituals are not particularly thought provoking. Indeed, the very idea of ritual typically conjures up a routine that can be performed effectively and repeatedly with as little interruption as possible. In other words, religious rituals are not often the source or opportunity for original or creative thought. After all, that is not their intent. The work of justifying a particular ritual has typically been done well before someone begins to participate in it. Institutional logics are enacted and supported at the organizational level by the articulation of sets of ideas or ideologies which are used to justify the activities of the organization. Thus, while the particular beliefs of individual congregations might differ significantly from one another, they all contribute to the overall project of seeking transcendental truth within the same broad theological framework. At the most macro level then, Christian churches tend to look more or less the same in terms of ideology and practice. It is precisely this homogeneity that Jeremy is expressing concern about in his final response to the Presbyterian pastor. In addition to Jeremy’s term, “orthodoxy,” several times during my fieldwork people expressed concern about developing an “orthopraxis.” That is, they were just as concerned with a common set of practices as they were with a common set of beliefs. They understand that these two things are inevitably related. Atomistic Ideology

The dominant ideology in contemporary religious organizations promotes a fragmented understanding of the world where society is broken up into two distinct and separate spheres. Religious ideologies often claim exclusive truth in understanding the world and the afterlife. This fragmentation results in a distinct separation of society into religious and non religious spheres for adherents, akin to Durkheim’s

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sacred and profane distinction (Ammerman 1997; Demmitt 1992; Sherkat and Ellison 1997). So much of modern, mainstream Christianity is built upon dividing the world into these dualisms. It has been profitable, both literally and metaphorically, for religious leaders to cultivate an “us” and “them” way of viewing the world. Sinners and saints, believers and non-believers, saved and condemned, good and evil, etc. This organizational logic of binary opposition is often seen as one of the defining characteristics of modern (i.e., not postmodern), Western thought, and can best be described as atomistic (Derrida 1997[1976]; Goody 1977; Levi-Strauss 1983 [1976]). As discussed above, dominant ideologies get transmitted and developed in organizations through the use of ideological articulations (e.g., rituals) that, in turn, affect an organization’s culture. This is no different for religious organizations which have arguably both a greater need and more opportunities to engage in the institutionalization of ideology through the acknowledgment of creeds, rituals, and other statements of faith. The presence of a creed or statement of faith, apart from any specific content, inherently limits the amount of diversity of people in an organization. Demerath (1995:460) makes the point that the articulated presence of a “galvanizing ethos” is every bit as important as the content. Apart from the sheer existence of these articulations of ideology, the content further serves to create and validate an atomistic world view. If the articulation promotes exclusive claims of truth, then that decreases the likelihood of the organization engaging in activities with people and/or groups who disagree with their claims of exclusivity. In other words, it limits organizational activities to only those activities that can be fully controlled or to those activities which involve other groups. The result is the institutionalization of a “right” set of beliefs. This does not have to take the form of identifying and castigating a rival organization. Instead, the language that is used promotes the primacy of one particular understanding of religion. Therefore, exclusive claims of truth and practice are made, and if there is only one right way, then all others must be wrong. For an ideology to become fully institutionalized, it must eliminate the legitimacy of competing sets of ideas. It comes as no surprise then, that the dominant institutionalized ideology in the field of religion would result in organizational activities that limits one’s possible exposure to competing ideas. An atomistic ideology allows religious organizations to affect individual practices not by encouraging or discouraging particular actions, but by defining the context within which those actions should occur. They attempt to circumscribe not the range

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of behaviors that one can imagine for oneself, but rather the places in which these behaviors can occur. Essentially, an institutionalized atomistic ideology provides justifiable reasons for initiating and engaging only in those activities over which it can exert a high degree of control. In this way, the institutionalization of an atomistic ideology leads to the creation of a parallel sphere for activities to occur. In the last half century, we have seen an explosion in the Christian culture industry in everything from traditional media, such as bookstores, radio and television, to more modern, web-based experiences like Christian social networking and dating sites. Christian businesses and associations are established as a way of conducting transactions while engaging the profane world as little as possible. Indeed, there is an entire system built around making sure that people know they are at a “Christian” business ranging from the rather subtle such as a religious symbol like a dove or ichthus in a company’s logo to the more explicit such as the publication of a Christian business directory or the Christian Chamber of Commerce. The rapid expansion of faith-based home and private schooling in the second half of the 20th century is another example of a parallel social institution. These separations help to create and institutionalize the exclusionist ideology that justifies its existence. These results reach their culmination with the largest congregations. As we saw in the last chapter, the modern megachurch often promotes this atomistic ideology by encompassing otherwise mundane or profane activities such as shopping, exercise and childcare within the sacred walls of the church. This ideology is clearly at odds with the spirit of the Emerging Church, but what can be done to resist the continuous pull toward establishing a codified set of beliefs? The individual refusals noted at the beginning of the chapter can only last so long without explicit organizational strategies designed to inhibit the development of an ideology which defines and constrains. If the dominant ideology results in exclusivity, then an alternative belief system must be conceptualized which privileges a diverse and inclusive set of beliefs. Unsettled Lives

In order to understand the difference between the ideology found in dominant religious institutions as opposed to the belief system in the Emerging Church, it is helpful to draw on Ann Swidler’s concept of “settled” and “unsettled” lives. Swidler makes the distinction between “settled” and “unsettled” lives when developing a theory of how culture impacts actions. She writes that, “[i]n settled lives, culture is intimately

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integrated with action; it is here that we are most tempted to see values as organizing and anchoring patterns of action” (Swidler 1986:278). Unsettled lives, in contrast, are those times when ideology is being actively created and multiple ideologies are competing against one another for dominance. In “settled” times, ideology is rendered invisible because it is intimately intertwined with people’s actions. The action and the reasons for engaging in the action are not distinguishable from one another. In most Protestant, Christian churches, for example, we can think of rituals ranging from communion to baptism to the recitation of the Apostle’s creed as actions which are institutionalized to the point that the underlying logic is inseparable from the action. Indeed, this is the very definition of institutionalization. In “unsettled” lives, by contrast, people constantly wrestle with the ramifications of different ideologies for their own actions, and ideas undergo continuous examination and evaluation. Swidler makes the point that we try to resolve the tension of unsettled lives by creating institutions or patterns of actions which allow us to act without always having to consider the logic underlying all of our decisions. Unsettled lives are inherently difficult to sustain because of the crisis they involve. Nonetheless, they are important in the effort to make sure ideas and beliefs do not become taken for granted, because they have the ability to render ideology as separate from action. What does an “unsettled life” look like in the Emerging Church? The congregants I interviewed recognized questioning as a key component in creating and sustaining unsettled lives. The creation of unsettled lives in a religious organization relies on shaking up the conventional or taken for granted assumptions which lie at the heart of so much traditional religious expression. Questioning the foundational beliefs of one’s religion is thus a key strategy for resisting institutionalization. As we will see below, if questioning is done relentlessly, it can support an ideological structure built on conversation rather than indoctrination. Questioning

One of the first things that is apparent when talking with people in the Emerging Church is that questioning is not only an important reason they attend an Emerging Church congregation, but also a key difference between their experiences in the Emerging Church and their experiences in mainstream churches. When I asked David why he feels like he

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finally found a spiritual home after years of trying out different churches he locates the presence of questioning as an important factor: For me, I’ve found a community of people who seem to be asking some of the same questions or at least who spark my interest, and I guess God sent me on a path to re-imagining my faith. Maybe I was already questioning some of what that was like and what the church was like and I just found a welcoming group of people who were excited about asking those questions and dialoguing and discussing. It was not what I was used to, but it is something that I love and something that’s helping me to grow a lot. The questioning is definitely more apparent than at my old churches. The format that we have is sermon and then discussion which is different than anything I had ever experienced because there is an actual tangible thing, like we’re all sitting here and we’re actually going to talk about these things and listen to each other and really think about this together.

Diane expresses a similar sentiment when I asked her why she has found a home at Faith after years of church switching. She says, I wonder if it has something to do with the freedom to keep creating. We try to question everything. Not to just develop a pattern and then follow that pattern. Like I don’t think any Emerging Church wants to be a model…A lot of the bigger churches, like the megachurches they work with models and ways to follow and ways to be like so and so…I don’t think any Emerging Church has a desire to do that.

When we look at these two quotes side by side, we gain some key insights about questioning in the Emerging Church. First, it marks this religious experience as distinctive from any other these people have had. They feel that none of the other stops along the way have allowed or encouraged questioning to the degree that their current congregations do. This makes the Emerging Church a unique place to them. Whether or not there is an actual difference in terms of the ability to “keep creating” is not nearly as relevant as the feeling of empowerment my respondents articulate. They clearly see an important difference between their previous religious homes and their current Emerging Church experience. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, questioning long held assumptions or ideas is translated directly into action for these respondents. David reports that it becomes a “tangible thing” in the organization while Diane notes that it lies at the heart of how the organization operates. They see this not as just so much talk, but as a fundamental part of the way religion is done in the Emerging Church.

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Finally, we can see that questioning is an important part of the community and the way they interact. My observations confirm that the dominant mode of communication, whether in formal settings or informal interactions, followed this model of inquiry where the goal was not to find an answer and settle the conversation, but rather to keep “reimagining” how things could be. As Diane added, “We don’t do resolution here like where we finally resolve that something is or is not a certain way. Instead we usually just end up with more questions.” In the field of religion, however, normative organizations do not usually rely on the whims of congregants to settle theological issues or find justification for resolutions. Instead, groups often appeal to a highly symbolic text to justify and legitimize their organizational activities. For Christians, the Bible becomes the legitimate claim to authority for settling debates—at least within a particular tradition. Groups turn to scripture regardless of what side of an issue they might come down (e.g., scripture is used to both allow and bar female pastors). Surprisingly, the Emerging Churches I examined, while generally eschewing statements of faith and other ideological articulations that would signal their legitimacy, did use the Bible to justify their refusal to articulate an ideology. It is important to recognize that the benefits gained by seeking legitimacy through reference to a contested document are primarily internal. Given the contentious nature of Biblical interpretation, it is unlikely that referring to scripture will satisfy members of other religious groups, and indeed, it has not (e.g., the debate between Pagitt and Friehl in recounted in chapter 1). Just as the Emerging Church cries foul at exclusionary interpretations of scripture, so to do those religious groups condemn the Emerging Church for perceived misuse of the Bible. In the discussion about articulated ideologies above, we learned that many of the benefits of ideological articulations are internal, therefore it is important that when resistance limits articulated ideologies, something else is there to make up for that lost legitimacy. One area in which Emergent Church members and/or leaders use the Bible as a source of internal legitimacy is their commitment to questioning that which is often taken for granted. My respondents consistently referred to the existence of questioning in the Bible as a justification for their own commitment to this stance. When I would ask them to tell me where they get this focus on questioning and dialogue, many of them gave responses similar to Joe: Interviewer: So in your opinion it’s better to ask a question than not, even if the ensuing discussion is dangerous or scary?

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Joe: Right. If you look at God’s word, if you look at the Bible it’s littered with questions that people ask. Even when Jesus died he said, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?”

In his explanation about the importance of questioning, Joe finds justification in one of the central acts of Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus. Joe, then, understands questioning not as something antithetical to his belief system, but rather as something intrinsic to the very formation of those beliefs. Perhaps the strongest use of Biblical justification for questioning were those respondents who connected questioning as it appears in the Bible with the creation of an anti-institutional faith. Gary did this very effectively in our conversation about the Emerging Church beyond the congregation he attends. I read a blog of a friend of mine the other day and he was so proud that his denomination had written a letter urging President Bush to step in and help create the defense of marriage act. And I just thought “Who cares? Of course his denomination did that…When an organization of Christians becomes so predictable that without even asking you know exactly what their stand will be on this issue, then it’s no longer in any way reflective of the Gospel, which is an ultimately unpredictable commodity.

Gary derives the justification for living an unsettled life directly from his reading of the scriptures. He sees the Bible as “an ultimately unpredictable commodity,” and thus makes no attempt to seek out agreement or commonality. Many of my respondents echoed this sentiment, reporting that instead of trying to create a single system of beliefs so that actions and ideologies could be tightly integrated (i.e., a “settled life,”) they preferred a system built on diversity and difference as displayed in their reading of the Bible. Diane explained that, It’s Biblical. In Psalms they’re talking with God and questioning God. I think in some ways the evangelical church has abandoned the fellowship of all believers where you have equal access. Instead you’re looking to one person to tell you what the Bible says. We want people more engaged and more willing to think about it you know? You read. Have faith. You pray. You engage with it. And then we’ll keep going down this road. It’s not that there’s one answer for all.

This quote by Diane emphasizes that the outcome of their commitment to questioning, in her experience, is a congregation that is more engaged

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and empowered. There was strong evidence from my respondents that they were required to examine their faith and come up with their own answers at Emerging Churches in ways that they never were able or forced to do at their other churches. Of course, these statements are fraught with difficulty as it is impossible to discern to what extent Emerging Churches attract these people or if they actually create them. Nevertheless it is the case that my respondents felt that legitimate questioning was intimately linked with good practices as well. Kenny provides a good indication of this connection between questioning and practice. I’m certain that if my family had been around for the kingdom of God discussion we had a few weeks ago I would have gotten an earful from my mother. One of the guys who was speaking was Matt Colombo, a religion professor, a secular religion professor, and he was talking about the kingdom of God and gave a quick overview about how he thinks it exists. I don’t know for sure, but I think he said that most or all people are going to be in heaven…And again, at Faith you need to learn how to think for yourself and ask, “Does what the person is saying line up with what I think?” You find yourself doing a whole lot more confrontation than being spoon fed.

Like Diane above, Kenny remarks that he has been compelled to question his own beliefs because of the dialogue that has taken place at his church. This experience is not only very different from those he had in the church where he grew up, but is in many ways more appealing to him even if it is more difficult. Creating and supporting organizations filled with individuals who feel as though they are “thinking for themselves,” as Kenny put it, for the first time has widespread implications not only for the day to day operations in individual congregations, but also for the barriers to participation in the Emerging Church in general. Instead of attracting and creating people who support the dominant ideology of the institution, they are able to focus on attracting people who will contribute to “the conversation” (see below). When it works, this conversational stance inherently mitigates against the institutionalization of any one set of beliefs. Gary indicates that this lack of institutionalization that is harmful to the stability of so many other religious organizations leads to a diversity in belief that is actually at the heart of the Emerging Church for him. He says, We are able to maintain this gradual equilibrium right now in the Emerging Church where we have Texas Baptists who don’t let women

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preach and stereotypical New England, Episcopalian, lesbian priests in the same organization getting along just fine because we’re not asking them to agree with one another. And I think that’s why there is interest in the media and among sociologists and theologians and others probably, because we’re all so acutely aware of how those very tensions are tearing asunder the Episcopalians, Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist, the PC USA. I mean, no one else has been able to maintain this equilibrium, everyone else is being thrown apart. But for us, we create and thrive on those tensions, we are not trying to resolve them the way that the denominations are.

And this coexistence does not occur simply on an aggregate level. The congregations I visited reflected this ideological diversity even within the same congregation where interactions between people with wildly different core beliefs occurred on a daily basis. Indeed, even though I asked every single interviewee if there were any theological absolutes or positions which most people in the congregation would agree with, there was never any agreement within a congregation beyond the occasional confirmation of a belief in Jesus Christ. Even the most general statements, such as this one by Reggie, “We’re kind of like, okay, we believe in Jesus and believe that he’s the Messiah, but everything else around those theological concepts are kind of up for grabs,” may evoke disagreement as I encountered numerous people who would take issue with the Messiah part and the use of “the” as opposed to “a.” Certainly, one should not make the mistake of thinking that mainstream religious organizations are filled with people who all think, act and believe the same even if people in the Emerging Church paint this picture frequently. That is simply not the case. However, in most congregations these differences and tensions, if acknowledged, are merely tolerated and, if possible, resolved (Starke and Dyck 1996). In contrast, my congregants gave no indication of any attempts to distill disagreement or tension, even over theological issues. Harry, who had grown up in a variety of mainline denominational churches, pointed to this as the key difference between his current church and his past church experiences. Interviewer: Are there people, then, here who have different viewpoints on theological issues? Harry: Oh yeah, I mean it’s disturbing sometimes to get into conversations with them. I mean, this is my brother, I go to church with him, and I can’t believe that he believes that. And that’s a big challenge for me, because I usually was around a lot of people who either I could agree with what they agreed with or we all acted like we

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agreed or something, and that’s just the way the church is normally. But not here. Here you have to engage those differences and talk about them.

While Harry views this theological diversity as challenging and not the least bit disturbing, one can also see that he appreciates the opportunities to engage with people in honest dialogue about their beliefs. He remarks that at his old churches sometimes people “acted like [they] agreed,” but that this does not happen in the Emerging Church. Later in our conversation he came back to this difference when he explained why he felt like the Emerging Church was a more authentic religious experience for him. What is perhaps most remarkable about this strategy of questioning is that it permeates organizational life even when individual congregants become frustrated or feel that there is a more productive way to get things done. Even in the midst of recounting frustration, my respondents were able to note the utility of their commitment to questioning. Megan expresses both of these sentiments when she talks about the “naval gazing” that goes on at Living Word: While being at Living Word you end up talking about Living Word a lot which I’m done with us talking about Living Word in the service. I’m done up with us talking about ourselves… and there was also the time when Living Word was redefining what it was again you know and so there was a lot of talk about what is this church doing for us or what can church be, and I know it’s useful, I just get so tired of it.

Justin, who has attended several Emerging Churches over the years, echoes this sentiment saying, You know, one of the weird things about these congregations is that we do do a lot of things in the community, outside the congregation, but we also spend so much time talking about ourselves as a congregation with each other. It seems like we’re continually reassessing. But I guess we wouldn’t exist without those conversations.

Justin sees this ongoing conversation about the congregation as getting in the way of doing more work in the community, but also recognizes the importance of corporate questioning. This is very similar to Megan’s statement above where she clearly indicates that there is a utility around the questioning, even if it is also the source of some frustration.

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Clearly, creating and sustaining an “unsettled life” is hard work. Nonetheless, the dividends in terms of resistance to institutionalized ideologies are undeniable. It should be obvious, however, that the presence of questioning as a strategy to avoid institutionalized ideologies does not rely on just individual commitment. Instead, it is built into the culture of the organization, as Justin and Megan both articulated above. In this way, the diversity of belief created and sustained through a commitment to questioning and dialogue helps the Emerging Church guard against settling into a pattern of belief and action where beliefs are taken for granted. Conversation

In addition to the strong commitment to questioning demonstrated by my respondents, people in the Emerging Church also sustained unsettled lives and guarded against the development of limiting ideologies by participating in what they referred to as “the conversation.” Their use of this phrase refers to an ongoing discussion about elements of the Emerging Church in general and about individual elements of faith in particular. Much like the term “emerging,” it indicates a continually changing and evolving state as opposed to something which is static. During my time in the field, I heard people refer to “the conversation” when discussing conversion, church switching, religious biographies, church history, Biblical interpretation, various creeds, rituals and symbols, and, perhaps most frequently, personal belief. To be in the Emerging Church means, as Joe put it, “to be a part of a large conversation of people asking questions about faith and religion.” This can be seen clearly in what are typically highly institutionalized religious elements: rituals and creeds. As I show above, people in the Emerging Church do not avoid utilizing creeds or performing rituals. Rather, the difference in the Emerging Church is that congregants are intentional about discussing why a creed will be read/spoken as a group, in this setting and what that means. Bielo (2011) explains that creeds and other statements of faith are used in the Emerging Church not as a way of promoting doctrine, but rather as a way of connecting modern churchgoers with the generations of believers who came before them. In this way, creeds serve an historical purpose as opposed to an instructive one. They become a part of the ongoing discussion of religion, something to be understood and evaluated rather than memorized and adhered to. This is easier to do in conversations as opposed to traditional preaching which is one of the reasons why Emerging Churches tend to

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be smaller and committed to this form of interaction. As Rose notes, this emphasis on conversation infuses even the way the sanctuary is arranged, and that before the congregation does something in worship, “[w]e’re going to talk about it. The way we even sit, where we all face each other in a big circle, is like a physical manifestation of how we want to be involved in each other’s lives.” The arrangement she is describing is a large circle with no singular focal point. A band sits off to the side of the seating, and although the speaker is generally situated in the middle of the circle, this is not a strict practice. Additionally, there are two screens used for projecting images, movies, lyrics and other visual media that are located opposite of one another outside the circle. A conversational approach encourages the exchange of ideas rather than simply the communication of a set of ideas by a central authority figure. Dispersing authority throughout the organization through the use of conversation and dialogue increases the number of perspectives present in any discussion and fundamentally undermines the development of an ego centered viewpoint (Gergen, McNamee and Barrett 2001). Dialogue encourages individuals to locate their own perspective amid the various positions being voiced, but not in a way which is divisive or defensive (Schein 1993). In other words, dialogue and conversation are inherently counter to the development of an atomistic ideology. William Isaacs (2001), a pioneer in organizational learning, has shown that the sharing of multiple perspectives can result in the creation of new associations of thoughts that is inclusive of many different viewpoints. These interactions bring with them the inherent ability to disrupt taken for granted patterns of thought and action (i.e., to avoid institutionalization). There is a distinct feeling among my respondents that ceding control and authority to multiple people through productive dialogue is not only useful for avoiding ideological rigidity, but is a more effective way of developing one’s own faith. Organizational scholars have advanced an understanding of effective dialogue as a process which moves beyond exchanging and defending viewpoints and toward the creation of a new experience, idea or culture (Bohm, Factor and Garrett 1991). This conception of dialogue involves some combination of voicing one’s initial thoughts or understandings, suspension of reaction, and development of shared understanding (Isaacs 1999; Schein 1993). These components do not have to occur in any order, and the process is rarely, if ever, linear, making this theory particularly useful for understanding the value of dialogue in organizations which resist institutionalization. This conception of dialogue “is not concerned with deliberately trying to alter or change behavior nor to get the participants to move toward a predetermined goal,” instead emphasizing the sharing of thoughts in

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order to make the taken for granted visible (Bohm, Factor and Garrett 1991:4). Often, religious ideology is communicated in the form of creeds and belief statements. These durable statements of faith and belief serve precisely the opposite purpose of conversation. They obscure the underlying ideology and assumptions. Building an ideology based off of conversation, of course, means that it is much more difficult to produce a durable artifact that can be canonized. Conversations are inherently dynamic and difficult to pin down. Of the congregations I visited, only three had traditional mission statements or statements of faith (see Table 1.4). People in the congregations that did not have statements of faith cite institutionalization as a prime motivating factor behind their decision to go without a written document. William indicated that the lack of a statement of faith is often a source of entering into conversation with someone. People ask me all the time what our statement of faith is, and I tell them we don’t have one, and I mean that. We don’t have one. We have hundreds. The only thing that a statement of faith does is serve to mark the boundaries of who can be in your group. And also, it’s very arrogant to think that you have the accurate understanding of God, because really, the only thing that knows God is God. So at Faith we recognize that we all have individual statements of faith and the worship service is where we get together and talk about these with each other and encourage each other to live more authentically in pursuit of our beliefs.

William makes the explicit link between a statement of faith and an inflexible, exclusive claim to truth while arguing that it is impossible to have a diverse and open community of believers if one has a strong doctrinal statement. His statements echo those at the beginning of the chapter indicating that the refusal to offer up a definition or statement of beliefs is endemic to the Emerging Church movement. We can see this most clearly by looking at Emergent Village, the largest and most well- known parachurch organization in the Emerging Church movement. Organizational theory suggests that it is the most visible organization in any field that faces the greatest pressure to institutionalize, and Emergent Village is certainly no exception. They face nearly constant pressure to announce what they, as a group, believe in. Emergent Village is self-described as a “friendship” of people involved in the Emerging Church who began gathering informally in the late 1990s before forming a formal organization in 2001 “as a means of as a means of inviting more people into the conversation” (Emergent

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Village). From the beginning, the stated intent of Emergent Village was not to establish a set of “right” practices or even to condemn others as wrong but rather to establish relationships among people who were concerned about the state of organized religion. With their combination of longevity and high profile, Emergent Village thus receives much of the criticism directed at the Emerging Church movement in general including charges of heresy. Gary, a member of the board of directors for Emergent Village with extensive knowledge of the movement as a whole, noted that a lot of his conversations about Emergent Village with outsiders are spent simply trying to communicate an unfamiliar way of doing church. When people say “Well, what about your statement of beliefs, what about your doctrinal statement?” I’ll say “You have to like shift your paradigm of what you understand to be of an organization of churches and Christians. If your neighbor invited you over for a dinner party and they invited everybody on the block, would you walk in and go, “Wait, before I sit down and eat dinner with you people, what’s your view of the atonement?” No, you wouldn’t do that because it’s a dinner party, it’s a fundamentally different kind of social gathering than a denominational meeting that meets in Louisville in the summer where they’re running the Robert’s Rules of Order and people are passing resolutions. And that’s what we’re after, a fundamentally different kind of social interaction for Christians, one built on friendships and relationships and difference rather than on orthodoxy.

What Gary is pointing out in this quote is that common agreement is not only unnecessary for mutual, respectful interaction in the Emerging Church but that they are making an explicit attempt to remove the categories of agreement and disagreement altogether in favor of sustained conversation through the questioning of taken for granted assumptions. Of course, they are not always successful at this, but it is important that they are making an effort in this direction. As I alluded to above, the ability of people in the Emerging Church to explain this new paradigm to outsiders is important. Challenges to produce a statement of beliefs are really challenges to the organization’s legitimacy, a questioning of the grounds upon which they are able to operate and exist. Despite becoming the largest and most well known formally organized group within the Emerging Church, Emergent Village has thus far managed to resist outside pressure to promote a set doctrine or even take a public stance on many issues at all. They know that to do so would inevitably end up shaping much of the rest of the movement,

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shutting down conversation rather than continuing dialog. However, they have faced increasing pressure recently to explain where the organization in particular and movement in general stands on issues ranging from abortion to homosexuality. Would they adopt a liberal stance calling for tolerance, or take a more conservative approach in line with other mainstream religious groups? Would they simply release a vacuous statement attempting to claim some middle ground? Alternatively, they could have simply done nothing, but they were already seeing how, in the absence of any statement, outsiders and those with high profiles could easily end up appearing to speak on behalf of the organization. Even if individual members had no intent of setting policy or agenda for Emergent Village, the ideas and stances they expressed in the press as a member of Emergent Village were inevitably being used to characterize the entire organization. So, relying on the theologian LeRon Shults, Emergent posted an Anti-Statement of Faith that explained why they declined to lay out their beliefs in bullet point (see appendix for full statement). As Dr. Shults (2006) points out, there is real danger in providing a statement of beliefs for an organization that seeks to be inclusive and dynamic rather than cohesive and static. He writes: Whether it appears in the by-laws of a congregation or in the catalog of an educational institution, a ‘statement of faith’ tends to stop conversation. Such statements can also easily become tools for manipulating or excluding people from the community. Too often they create an environment in which real conversation is avoided out of fear that critical reflection on one or more of the sacred propositions will lead to excommunication from the community. Emergent seeks to provide a milieu in which others are welcomed to join in the pursuit of life “in” the One who is true (1 John 5:20). Giving into the pressure to petrify the conversation in a “statement” would make Emergent easier to control; its critics could dissect it and then place it in a theological museum alongside other dead conceptual specimens the curators find opprobrious. But living, moving things do not belong in museums. Whatever else Emergent may be, it is a movement committed to encouraging the lively pursuit of God and to inviting others into a delightfully terrifying conversation along the way. (Shults 2006)

The Anti-Statement of Faith aided the project of resistance by erasing even the possibility of an institutionalized ideology which could be pointed to or adopted without question. There is no taken for granted justification for the organization’s existence and thus no barriers to participation in order for more people to join. One need not agree with all or even most of the other members on key theological issues. The

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Anti-Statement of Faith fosters a high degree of consciousness among members of the organization by making it clear that stances on key issues must be justified only by the person holding a particular position. There can be no hiding behind the institution. Further, the AntiStatement of Faith means that calls for uniformity and orthodoxy are seen as an opportunity to continue the conversation rather than to settle on an answer. Although they have since posted a more detailed statement of values and practices, the spirit is much the same and the content decidedly lacking in absolutes. But it is not necessary that this discussion extend only to written or spoken statements. Aside from creeds, religious rituals often serve to institutionalize ideologies. Thus, the same logic of “the conversation” that was utilized for creeds is successfully applied to rituals and ceremonies as well. For example, in an effort to retain parts of a traditional worship which the congregation values for both spiritual and historical reasons, Faith made a decision to include communion as a regular part of the worship service. The administration of communion is historically an extremely sacred and highly ritualized portion of a Christian service where even minor differences in the routine or language can be the result of significant theological and political battles. In nearly every denomination, communion can only be properly administered by a trained professional (i.e., clergy) with some denominations insisting that upon the utterance of the right words in the right order by the right people the symbolic bread and wine cease to be bread and wine and instead become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. Regardless of particular beliefs about transubstantiation, it is widely held that participating in communion is necessary for the forgiveness of sins and admittance to Heaven. In short, it is a pretty serious ceremony, and it is easy to see why it has traditionally fallen under the domain of the clergy. But ceding power to one person or group of people to define this ritual is not something that Emerging Church goers are typically comfortable with. Gary, a longtime congregant of Faith Church, put it this way: Well, then why do you think you should be able to say [communion]? Because you went to a seminary? What gives someone the right to go to a seminary? Because they have enough money for it? Because they finished their undergraduate degree and got into a seminary to go get their M.Div.? I mean you start chipping away at that and a lot of people start to change [the way they think about communion].

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Gary is clearly indicating that seminary training does not leave one more qualified to administer the ritual of communion. The traditional concentration of pastoral authority around religious rituals is problematic for Gary because he connects seminary and pastoral training with a particular social class and kind of intelligence, neither of which he deems crucial, or even related to, the ability to perform communion effectively. With these sentiments as the backdrop, the communion ceremony at Faith begins with a person explaining what they believe communion is. Standing in the middle of the congregation with a microphone, the attention of the entire congregation is given over to one person to explain their personal meaning of communion. The power to define what this most sacred ritual means is not doled out according to training, but rather is distributed based on desire. Each week a different person shares what he/she feels communion means, an act that serves to strengthen relationships while simultaneously “continuing the conversation.” Following this, the bread and wine are blessed by the entire congregation and then communion is administered from any one of several stations by anyone who wishes to serve. There are no common actions or ritual words. Each week there is a short explanation or introduction of the communion process, but even this is not codified. The result is mothers giving communion to their children and then turning around to receive communion from a stranger. At the precise juncture from which the priesthood has traditionally derived much of its authority, there is both an ideology and a structure in place to undermine a concentration of power in the hands of one person, position or group of people. This has the effect of ensuring that the authority to define the meaning of the collective act is shifted, to either the person speaking that particular week or, more likely, to the individual congregant who must make sense of the constantly changing interpretations of a very common act. The communion ritual at Faith is a good example of how this conversational emphasis is translated to rituals. Although communion is a durable ritual which can be reenacted with ease for most longtime churchgoers, it would be nearly impossible to replicate a week of communion at Faith because of the way that the ceremony is personalized. In this way, rituals and ceremonies, which usually rely on routine and tradition for their power, can be formulated to resist institutionalization even while being utilized for their other benefits, such as group cohesion and religious expression. It is clear that people in the Emerging Church have an unusually strong sense of the power of symbols. They intentionally design

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elements from seating to basic religious ceremonies in order to reinforce their commitment to questioning and conversation. The designation that Robert Wuthnow applies to this realization of the power of symbols is “symbolic consciousness.” He argues that one of the key features for religious groups which wish to avoid mainstream ideologies is that they foster a high degree of symbolic consciousness (Wuthnow 1988). Typically, the symbolic components of a religious organization are so institutionalized that the only group in the organization which does not take them for granted is the newcomers who are still learning them (e.g., children in confirmation classes, converts). This group often has a high degree of symbolic consciousness, and to them, the religious organization appears to be very constructed (Roof 1999). Wuthnow goes on to make the point that many “new religious movements are also replete with evidence of the self-conscious application and manipulation of symbols,” because they evolve from small groups who are inherently aware of their own power to shape ritual, myth and symbol and the corresponding structure of the organization (1988:299). The collective symbolic consciousness of people in the Emerging Church is on full display in their desire to sustain a conversation about religious elements that are not typically thought to be up for discussion. Holistic Ideology

Ideas play a crucial role in organizations. They serve to legitimate actions and justify the existence of the group as a distinct entity. Their very presence helps to determine the barriers to participation in the organization and their content acts to regulate the boundaries of the organization. Most importantly, however, organizational ideologies serve as a powerful point of institutionalization for organizations. Mainstream organizations craft ideologies in ways that signal the legitimacy of the group. The Emerging Church, on the other hand, actively combats the institutionalization of ideas through the utilization of sophisticated strategies aimed at making the ideas and power interests that accompany ideologies visible and apparent so they do not become taken for granted. In their attempts to avoid the institutionalization of a dominant set of beliefs through questioning and conversation, the Emerging Church congregations I visited created an ideology that can best be characterized as holistic. When I asked Jerica to elaborate on the mindset that appeals to him about his church, he said,

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Well there’s two things for me. One is the ability and the invitation for all people to participate in a real and meaningful way on a daily basis. The second is the integration of life that there isn’t sort of like these Christian things we do and these non-Christian things we do. Life is all wrapped up in everything. It’s a very organic holistic approach.

The Emerging Church does not attempt to challenge the dominant logic of Christianity (congregants still seek transcendental truth), but rather the institutionalization of the logic. The people I interviewed intentionally sought to re-inject thought and purpose into supporting the institutional logic so that the project does not become taken for granted. Any challenge of this type must take as its starting place the presence and content of articulated organizational ideologies, as they are the mechanisms that render the dominant institutional logics invisible. In traditional churches, congregants are not required or, in many cases, encouraged to regard the larger project of seeking transcendental truth if they have a ritual supported by a rationale that someone in power has told them contributes to the larger project. In the Emerging Church this orientation would be much more difficult to sustain. My experiences in the congregations, affirmed in the interviews, suggests that it would actually be more difficult not to examine taken for granted assumptions in much of the Emerging Church. The result is that instead of cultivating an understanding of the world as divided into religious and non-religious spheres, where the boundaries between the two are continually contested and fought over to avoid the intrusion of one upon the other, the people in the Emerging Church understand those encroachments as a part of their faith. Pete, a pastor at Fellowship, put it this way: The conversation didn’t start here inside these walls, and it doesn’t end when we leave this space. When we say that we want to join others in a conversation about faith and God, we don’t just mean other people in our own congregation. It means joining the metaphorical ‘conversation’ everywhere. The way we see it, there is no ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ because when we leave here we are out there. I know that sounds kinda weird or whatever, but what I’m getting at is that we don’t see the division between the outside world and the religious world. We don’t perceive questions or opposition or disagreement as challenges or threats.

The boundaries of the Emerging Church are intentionally amorphous, pliable and open to external forces. These outside influences actually serve as fuel for the movement because they are dealt with in a paradigm

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of questioning and conversation. To put it in Swidler’s terms, the people in the Emerging Church have developed practices and habits that seek to sustain permanent versions of “unsettled lives” (Swidler 1986). The downside of living daily in this kind of negotiated religious space is that it can wear down a congregation, even one as committed to the process as most of the ones in this study appeared to be. As Megan indicated above, even though she recognizes the value of the process, it gets very tiring to be so consciously engaged in self-reflection and introspection. Critics point out that the Emerging Church is navelgazing, concerned only, or primarily, with their own issues and problems. This concern was echoed by my respondents as well. Although they recognize that “the conversation” is a way to keep the group open to outsiders, there is also the feeling that, as Pete told me at the end of our interview, “at the end of the day, though, we have to actually do something. It’s not enough for us to just exist.” While the next chapter deals with this to a large extent, examining how things actually get done in these congregations, Pete’s point, which others expressed to me as well, speak to something much more foundational about trying to maintain unsettled lives. Namely, there is real concern for how sustainable this orientation is over the long term. Additionally, there is the related question of whether this matters. The most common explanation/criticism that I heard during my time in the field was that the Emerging Church is primarily for people in a particular life-stage where they have ample resources (e.g., time) to devote to the kinds of activities necessary to sustain the movement. While my respondents, and Emerging Church apologists, emphatically reject this claim, it seems that this is based more on potential than actuality. The disconnect is that critics like to paint the Emerging Church as a home for young, disaffiliated Christians, and in this respect, insiders of the movement are correct to reject this characterization as many congregations, including the ones profiled here, are filled with retired and older members. Looking more broadly, we can see that this criticism is embedded in a larger claim that the Emerging Church is not really for everyone as it is nearly impossible to devote that much time and energy to a congregation when one is married, with children, in a dual-career family. This criticism is well-founded as it functionally precludes many from participating in the time-intensive activities necessary to sustain an unsettled life. Additionally, as that family profile increasingly defines life for many Americans it means that the Emerging Church, despite what congregants may desire, will continue to be the home for a particular kind of religious person in a specific life station. To the extent

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that this life station matches up with class, racial and ethnic divides, the Emerging Church will never be able to successfully court the kind of diversity it professes to desire, at least here in the United States. However, I am not so sure that this is such a major issue, while it is understandable that leaders and movement insiders would like the movement to be seen as having widespread appeal, I think what this study demonstrates is that there is a need for the Emerging Church and organizations like it because they appeal to a kind of person that cannot find a religious home elsewhere. Although this might contradict with stated goals of many within the movement, it is not a sign that the movement itself is simply a fad or something to be written off. Living, or trying to live, permanently unsettled lives requires a tremendous amount of work, to be sure, but it is precisely this opportunity which my respondents found lacking in other places and which appeals to them so much. Even if it is ultimately only for a short time period or phase of life, the unsettled life of the Emerging Church and the project of organizational resistance still retains value.

4 Getting Things Done

In the previous chapter, we saw that people in the Emerging Church truly value an organization that is in a constant state of flux. These ideological commitments almost necessarily beg the question, How does anything actually get done in an Emerging Church congregation? If the members seek to avoid routines and dogma, what organizational strategies are used in place of these to ensure that the day to day business of running a congregation still gets completed? What becomes clear is that, much as we saw in the last chapter, members continue to be on guard against those elements that might lead to a concentration of power. In other words, the ideological stance of Emerging Church is manifested in the daily operations of individual congregations. With this in mind, they construct organizational processes in ways that significantly alter the normal relationship between a pastor or other religious professional and the congregation. The result is a relocation of organizational activity and authority away from paid and/or credentialed professionals and into the domain of the laity. Perhaps what is most clear from talking to my respondents is that these processes have been developed intentionally, as a response to what they viewed as the damaging or unsatisfactory arrangements they had experienced in other congregations. Introduction

Professionalism is, essentially, certification in exchange for trust. Discretion after testing. We wait until a person has much invested in maintaining the status quo before we allow him/her to exercise discretion in developing organizational procedures and processes. Certainly, professionals have more freedom than other workers, but they are only allowed this freedom when the range of likely outcomes from any decision they make or action they take has been circumscribed 85

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through the process of professionalization. This traditional form of professionalism is characterized by regulation which can come either internally as a result of professionalization or externally in the form of oversight. Both of these forms are present in the field of religion, and, at least for my respondents, this kind of professionalism creates churches which are unappealing. Melinda makes the explicit connection between the professional pastor and a stifling, predictable environment when she describes why she and some of her friends left a traditional church to join a Living Word. “Mount Olive was just very traditional. Very structured. You’d have your liturgical worship-word, sacrament, offering-and it would all be run by a pastor. I mean it’s just very structured…too structured, too controlling.” There is a recognition that doing church in this kind of institutionalized way is not only undesirable from a personal preference standpoint, but that it could also limit a person’s relationship with God. In contrast to the traditional version of professionalism which requires proof before trust, the Emerging Church utilizes a system of unregulated discretion where trust comes prior to credentials in an effort to reverse the restrictions. The congregations I visited employed three very distinct strategies to keep organizational processes from becoming institutionalized. First, they create an inverted labor structure where positions which typically have the greatest prestige and corresponding income are employed only on a part time or volunteer basis and positions which typically require the least amount of specialized training are employed full time. Second, experience is emphasized over credentialed training or education. Finally, the nature of the religious call is changed to emphasize a calling to a group or cause rather than a calling by a group or organization. The result of these three strategies is the creation of organizational procedures which are able to take advantage of the specialized training and vocational dedication professionals provide while avoiding the routinization that typically accompanies people with formal credentials. Avoiding the institutionalization of organizational processes is important for groups of people who have determined that the form of religious expression they favor is one which is inherently unpredictable. It is important to keep in mind that the Emerging Churches in this study are not avoiding the use of professionals altogether. Indeed, they see professionals as valuable for both the legitimacy that they lend the organization and the specialized knowledge and skills they offer. Instead, they want to avoid two very particular things that normally occur with professionals; two characteristics of professionals. First, while they actively seek professionals for their organization, they do not

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want to give those professionals too many opportunities to institute the technical training they receive in seminary. Ned, a seminary student who interns at Living Word explained this concern while recounting his decision to do his internship at an Emerging Church. And I think also a lot of the seminaries I know are based on different epistemological structures where it’s very much foundational. They are going to teach you the correct doctrine so that when you go out and you send forth the gospel you will have all of the right doctrines about whatever, speaking in tongues or church finance or whatever, to take to the world. It’s an answer factory. And that’s not at all what I was looking for and that’s not at all what I felt like the people around me needed.

The Emerging Church is seen as a place where answers are not the important thing, where authority is less important than in some other venues. This explicitly attracted Ned to do his professional training in that context because he also values those qualities. Second, they also want to avoid the creation of standard operating procedures that might occur while the clergyperson occupies his/her position. Diane explains the incompatibility of routinization with her faith when she describes her previous, more mainstream, church experiences. She feels he was really limited by the professionals who ran the churches he attended. I could look back on it and go I think the people who are in ministry are really trying to follow God the way that they believe God wants them to go and based on how they were trained so I don’t have any ill feeling toward that, but I think there’s an innate unhealth about it because I think that when you’re shown a way, I think people start to look the same and talk the same and act the same and ah, you can’t realize it when you’re in it but when you’re out of it you’re like “Wow, I was really conforming. I wasn’t having fresh thoughts.” Even the curriculum for the children’s ministry we just picked the best that was out there to buy. We didn’t have the opportunity to think about what else is there. There was no dreaming. It was so corporate. It just didn’t feel authentic even though we were trying to do what was right.

Diane explicitly identifies the source of her feelings of inauthenticity as deriving from the “corporate” or institutionalized environment created by a pastoral staff that had undergone an extensive process of professionalization, but is just as quick to point out that she does not think pastors are bad people or even necessarily bad for congregations. If it were possible to retain the professional without limiting creativity

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and individualism, then Diane would be all for it. It is this search that ultimately led Diane to the Emerging Church. George validates Diane’s feelings and suggests that traditionally trained professionals can create conflict in an Emerging Church congregation when he discusses the pastor at Living Word. “Ronald’s been great for us in a lot of ways, and there’s no way we could afford to pay someone else full-time, but I wonder sometimes if he really gets how we’re trying to do things here. In some ways it’s nice to have direction and you have to grow, but at the same time, it has to be done in the right way. He doesn’t always have to be ‘the guy.’” Living Word has a history of relatively open decision making with meetings being organized as needed by congregants and open to anyone. However, they faced some structural restraints due to their official ties with a denominational church which both founded and continues to finance their operations. This relationship required certain budget formats, and leadership structure and qualifications. With the appointment of Ronald, an ordained minister in the denomination, as pastor earlier in the year I conducted my research, they began to move away from their normal governance structure and toward a more traditional, centralized arrangement where the pastor has far more power to institute procedures and programs based on his training. Ronald increasingly served as a gatekeeper, creating a cadre of people who were “leadership oriented” to help him direct the congregation. He indicated that there was a Biblical basis for this kind of decision making structure as directly opposed to democracy. We don’t do voting. Somebody asked that. They said “When are going to vote for [the leadership team] because otherwise this isn’t representative?” Well there were like no votes in the Bible, okay. Come on. Do you want to be Biblical or do you want to be democratic? This isn’t a civics class…Like we’re having a big meeting at the end of the summer and I’m hand picking the people to go to that-some of our more leadership oriented people. In the past they’ve done the gatherings where anyone can come, and I just said, let’s put that aside for a while.

These new policies were not met with overt resistance during the time I was there, but there were signs of dissatisfaction. The congregants consistently and consciously linked the role of the professional pastor with their dissatisfaction with congregational changes. Individual comments during interviews and conversations and the formation of a group thinking about leaving to start their own church were directly tied to Ronald’s method of pastoring. The lack of financial self-sufficiency,

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however, makes it difficult to formally resist the pastor’s efforts and maintain the status quo as the congregation could not afford to call a full-time pastor on its own. Eighty percent of Ronald’s salary is covered by the mother church for Living Word, where he also works part time as a minister. Ronald is thus immune, to some extent, from resistance within the congregation since they do not pay most of his salary or have the ability to replace him. Perhaps, the greatest evidence that a congregation can provide of their collective distaste for traditional pastoral roles is in the way they conduct corporate worship. Liturgy selection and worship construction is often the domain of the religious professional. Thus, a rejection of a formula for worship is, to some extent, a rejection of the institutionalization of pastoral authority (Packard 2011). To this end, the congregations in this study are off to a good start. My fieldnotes and interviews were littered with comments and exchanges like this one between myself and a longtime member of Fellowship: Interviewer: Yesterday, before worship, someone made an announcement and said we were going to do something different. What part was different? Aaron: [laughter] They always say that we’re going to do something different. We hear it all the time. “We’re going to do something different” and we’re like “Okay. Whatever.” Every week there is something different going on. We don't have the same weeks. I mean if you were even there for the first hour before we have church we have Bible study we always hear “Okay, we’re going to do something different today.” And it’s like since I've been going there nothing has been the same. They completely broke the model about walking into church and sit down and prep your Bibles and have worshipful hymns and we all sit back down and then the guy talks up here and then we pray and then we go out to eat at Denny’s. I mean this whole routine that everyone is used to, we don’t do it that way at all.

Aaron’s comments about going to eat at Denny’s should be understood as more than just poking fun at what he considers to be more traditional and less innovative congregations. It is also an indication that he, and the other people in his church, have a savvy understanding that the way church is done during “official” events also structures what happens when people are away from the church. Where some people might find comfort in the familiar religious rituals and routines, the people in the Emerging Church continually state just the opposite and attempt to avoid establishing taken for granted practices.

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A husband and wife from Calvary echoed these sentiments, arguing that the routinization of worship at traditional churches was a major drawback to their previous church experiences. Interviewer: What appeals to you about this church? Jessica: You’ve got a to come up for yourself what is going to work for your own congregation, because they’re all different. Wade: Yeah, it’s really formulaic at most traditional churches. Jessica: We’ve been in a lot of different places and one message does not fit everyone. What’s that book that everyone is using now? Wade: The Purpose Driven Life. Jessica: Yeah, the whole nation is into the purpose driven everything. And what was the one before that? The Prayer of Jabez. I was like “Oh my gosh, can anybody go to the Bible and find their own stinkin’ answers and can anybody pray and ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten them?” Or do we all just suck up the leftovers of other people. Why do we do that? We can find God for ourselves. It’s just laziness. It’s fast food nation, you know?

The people I interviewed consistently linked the lack of routinization with organizational processes as a key reason why they were attracted to the Emerging Church. Even if they did not understand that this would be a crucial aspect when they began attending, they are clearly able to identify its importance to their ability to have a unique religious experience. One should not get the impression from the above quotes, however, that activities in these congregations approach chaos. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Pastor Ricky does a good job of explaining this dynamic through the role of worship liturgies in an Emerging Church. Interviewer: When people show up on Sunday nights do they know what to expect? Pastor Ricky: Our intent is that we start with a blank slate every week. Something that I’ve explored is whether we could take the form of the Catholic mass because they have the same worship order every week. They have sort of built in elements that they rotate through but the structure is the same so that's one of the things that I’ve wanted to do since we started was to take a season and do that because there’s a

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different thing that you learn and experience in that approach to worship.

Pastor Ricky’s comments exemplify the unique approach of people in the Emerging Church. They are not anti-liturgy. In fact, the services I attended employed lots of liturgy. They are not avoiding any particular liturgy, but rather the idea of being liturgical. They resist being locked in to a specific form of worship to the exclusion of all others. Professionally trained clergy simply do not receive training that is consonant with the goals of the people in the Emerging Church. In fact, when it comes to things like church liturgy and other organizational processes, quite the opposite is true. In order to limit the scope of professional authority within the congregation, then, Emerging Church congregations employ some very identifiable strategies. Volitional Strategizing Inverted Labor

In traditional organizations professionals reside at or near the top of the scale for both pay and prestige. The opposite was true for the congregations I visited. For those congregations that could afford to pay staff, the workers which were full-time were usually the ones with the least qualifications, credentials or training, and the pastoral staff often received only part-time pay or none at all even when the congregation could afford to support him/her. This decoupling of monetary reward from professional qualifications impacts the development of organizational procedures in two primary ways. First, the fact that workers with lower prestige are full-time staff means that they are around more, and thus often have a more intimate understanding of the congregation than the religious professionals. This knowledge helps to equalize the inherent power differential between regular staff and religious professionals and thus the clergy and the congregation often accord them power in the decision making process that they would not normally enjoy. Second, because their positions are constructed in a fundamentally different way, the clergy are unable to rely on the practices developed in the course of their professionalization. They simply do not have the time to spend instituting and maintaining processes which might conform to the dominant industry standard but which might ultimately be inefficient for their congregation.

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Prestige and Knowledge

Contrary to the dominant organizational model, the Emerging Church congregations I observed employed workers with little or no professional credentials on a full-time basis. This, especially when combined with the part-time employment of the clergy, shifts the basis of power away from those with the most credentials and training and toward those with the most experience and local knowledge. Ultimately what this means for the organization is that they are better able to avoid the routinization of organizational processes, because they rely less on people who have been trained to do things in a particular way. A perfect example of this is at Living Word where George is the worship director and only full-time staff. He is not only the sole fulltime staff member; he is also the only member of staff who has been with the church for its entirety. The congregation is on its third part-time pastor in its’ existence and there is another part-time staff member, but George, who had no religious credentials or experience prior to starting to work for Living Word, is the person people are referred to when they have questions about the church. In my interviews with congregants and staff, I was referred to him for everything ranging from the history of the congregation to the way decisions are made about budgets and membership to the planning of worship and service events. However, George has no contract and “wrote his own job description” which was “never formally notated,” and “was so long ago that nobody really remembers it.” For his part, George is very careful to avoid speaking about matters which he deems to be out of his expertise. Although he has done some pastoral care duties such as visiting people in the hospital when the pastor(s) are out of town, he says that pastoral care and long-term planning and scope issues are really not his gifts. Whenever I asked him about the future of the congregation or anything that bordered on issues broader than Living Word such as the theology of the Emerging Church or the denomination’s stance on homosexuality, he was quick to refer me back to one of the religious professionals that served the congregation (in addition to the pastor, there was always at least one seminary student doing an internship at Living Word). For example, when I asked him about the Emerging Church in general he said, This is something you need to talk with the pastors about…My gift really lies in including everyone and getting the best out of people. Getting them to do the best they can at their thing is what I’ve really come to see as my gift. As far as discussing, you know, global trends

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and demographics in worship, Ned is really better at it. I am so ingrained in my neighborhood and my whole thing that for me to try and understand how these people are doing it or how those people are doing it is kind of challenging for the size of my brain.

In addition to providing a glimpse into how George sees himself in the organization, the above quote also demonstrates that people in the Emerging Church have no interest in doing away with religious professionals. Just as these congregations had no intention of getting rid of bureaucracy completely, they expressed no interest in completely divesting themselves of educated, trained and credentialed religious professionals. They understand that people who have been intensely trained for very specific tasks provide important services to a congregation. In this case, for example, it frees George up to focus on local issues while taking them out of the hands of the credentialed staff. This illustrates how a division of labor which allows for lower prestige positions to have a high degree of autonomy, knowledge and control serves to utilize the skills of the religious professional without giving over too much power and authority. George’s primary duty is to prepare worship each week, and the worship at Living Word is unlike that at any other congregation in this denomination. The services mix elements developed by George and various current and former congregants with traditional liturgical elements. The point here is not that Living Word has an odd style of worship, but rather that it has a style of worship which is intimately tied to one person. We are reminded by Zucker that institutionalized organizational procedures are those which exist apart from any individual actor (Zucker 1987). An institutionalized worship service, then, is one which would be done in exactly or at least approximately, the same way even after the worship director was replaced for one reason or another. In fact, the institutionalization of the worship service is a significant goal of many Christian churches who seek to develop a liturgy which both unites the various congregations and separates or signifies difference with other denominations. The worship service at Living Word, conversely, is intimately tied to George and his particular knowledge of the community on both a day to day and a historical basis. Thus, from one week to another the services at Living Word may look similar, and on any given week they may be like those at more traditional congregations. But as soon as George leaves, there is absolutely no way to keep the services from changing as there is nobody with his combination of knowledge and skills. There is no place or institution which would or could offer a

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credential certifying someone to conduct worship services in the George style. This is precisely the service that seminaries provide for most traditional, mainline congregations who use ordained clergy to perform services and other organizational procedures. Obviously, there are congregations in other areas of Christianity that could make the same claims. Many non-denominational churches, for example, operate without a set liturgy. The difference with the Emerging Church is that they actively work to make sure that their worship elements are not replicable. Of course, congregations like Living Word attract a fair amount of attention, drawing numerous gawkers each week who are only there to see how things are done. George explains the unique challenge of trying to get people to understand the concepts behind the specifics of their success. Interviewer: Do people ask you for advice? George: You know, so many people come to us and say “Can we sit down with your leadership team and our leadership team and talk about how we can do this in our church?” We’re just like “We don’t have a manual. We made this up, and we’re still making it up. And the things we screwed up on before we’re still trying to fix.” We get a seminary class every semester and it takes a lot of convincing to get them to understand that what we do is not a formula to be copied. I mean, there are certain principles you might find useful, but even those reinforce the point that you can’t copy this. For example, we always tell people to be more contextual and listen to their own communities more.

It is important to remember that congregations like Living Word do not avoid institutionalized processes just for the sake of resisting, but because they take the stance that such processes impede the congregation from reaching its goal of an authentic expression of faith. There is a firm belief, expressed continually by my respondents, that the common, standardized way of worshipping they had experienced in previous church stops was simply not meeting their needs. This sentiment has been part of the Emerging Church from the very beginning. Although the Emerging Church has often been stereotyped for having a “three ‘C’” liturgy (candles, couches, and circles), anyone who spends a reasonable amount of time with the movement understands that there is a startling diversity both within and between congregations. The closest thing to an Emerging Church liturgy was laid out by Dan Kimball in his innovative 2003 book The Emerging Church:

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Vintage Christianity for New Generations. In the text, he starts from the assumption that “instead of one emerging-church model, there are hundreds and thousands of models of emerging churches” (Kimball 2003:14). Much of the rest of the text implores practitioners to make extensive use of local talents and histories. Rather than reading like a manual, the book repeats different versions of the same mantra, imploring congregations to find what works for them. These calls clearly connect with the first-hand account from George above who stresses essentially the same thing. Part-Time Professionals

None of the congregations employed a full-time pastor. Though some would have liked to, budget constraints arising from smaller size meant that they could not afford to support someone full-time. However, the benefits of having a part-time religious professional remained. These congregations were able to take advantage of the skills and expertise of such a person and yet still manage to retain a significant amount of flexibility in organizational procedure. In every case, however, the pastor was only paid for part-time work. Furthermore, the pastors at both Crossroads and Faith were actively seeking to reduce even their part-time pay down to a volunteer basis. William, the pastor at Faith, told me that he was actively looking for ways to detach his livelihood from the church. I’m really trying to find a number of ways to supplement my income in order to get to a point that the people here don’t have to spend their resources supporting me unless they want to. I want to get to a point to where I don’t need the financial support from this congregation. I think it will really free up me and them. Like, I would never consciously change or censor what I say and do, but at the same time, I’ve got three kids at home that need to eat so I’m sure that plays into my decision making in ways that I’m not even aware of.

Tim, the founding pastor of Crossroads, has a similar intention. We keep moving further and further away from me drawing any salary from Crossroads. My intention never was for this to be a paying gig. That’s why I do all the other projects, the books and speaking and stuff. Not getting a paycheck allows me to say and do what I feel is best and for the congregation to accept or reject that on its own merits.

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As founding pastors, neither of these men has ever been fully supported by their congregations. In the beginning, they simply did not generate enough revenue, and now that the money is there, the desire for these professionals to be full-time is lacking from both the congregation and the pastors. A system of part-time professionals has profound effects on the way the organization is run. Not only is it the case that the clergy do not have the time to implement many of the procedures that they learned in their training, but they are also prohibited from using many of these traditional processes out of sheer ineffectiveness. Much of their training is just not applicable to an organization where the pastor is not the only or even the primary person in charge. A good example of this is with the issue of attendance. The congregations I observed did not count the number of people who showed up to a particular event, even weekly worship. More importantly, there would be no group or person to report these numbers to if they did keep track of them. Congregational planning thus proceeds according to a different set of criteria rather than simply trying to attract new members or accommodate growth, the two congregational planning phenomena for which pastors traditionally receive the most professionalization and, not coincidentally, experience the most oversight (Marty 1988). As Christopherson found in his study of traditional pastoral careers, “when clergy talk about what they want to accomplish, what it is that they are called to do, they inevitably talk about change and growth” (Christopherson 1994:28). This is isomorphism at its finest as it is unclear where the impetus for congregational growth training comes from. Do congregations demand such training? Is it really something inherent to most pastors as Christopherson’s respondents suggest? Or is it a function of seminaries attempting to train influential and powerful clergy? Regardless of the source, the institutionalization of accounting and planning procedures for managing congregation growth are impossible to deny, and nearly every guidebook or training proceeds according to quantifiable, technical specifications. In the congregations I visited, however, this is not how decisions were made. The part-time nature of the professional meant that planning had to proceed according to a set of criteria that was intrinsic to the local context and is beyond the professional’s formal training. For example, during my time at Faith, they were experiencing tremendous growth and the Sunday gathering had become extremely crowded to the point that it was standing room only. People were routinely arriving 45-60 minutes early, and were even saving seats for

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one another. The people I talked with were dissatisfied with this set-up, not because it was difficult for them to find parking in the residential neighborhood where the church was located or because of the stiflingly hot temperatures in a building with no air conditioning and people sitting closely together. Instead, there was concern that such a set-up was not consonant with their values of being a community which is welcoming to outsiders. Indeed, there was some disappointment expressed that when resources such as seating got scarce, people started to hoard by saving seats and arriving early. People were disappointed because this is contrary to the way they want to be as a congregation. The only immediate solution, which involved moving to two services, however, meant violating their value of community to some extent. In a semi-annual meeting open to all members, it was recognized that the current situation was not fostering community either, but rather the formation of cliques. Other alternatives were considered, such as refusing to accommodate growth at the current location in order to encourage the formation of another congregation somewhere in the city or building a larger gathering space. One group even advocated eliminating the weekly gatherings altogether on the grounds that they were just one very small part of their lives as a community and that this small part consumed a disproportionate amount of the congregation’s resources.1 In the end the leadership team proposed to the congregation that if services felt too full for 5 consecutive weeks, then they would move to two, back to back, gatherings on Sunday evenings in an effort to restore an atmosphere that was both more open to outsiders and would re-establish their commitment to community. No criteria were provided for how “full” status would be established. This decision was put up to a vote and agreed upon by the community. This particular example illustrates several key components about having a pastor who is part-time. In this case the decision making process for how to plan the future of the congregation was not made to encourage or accommodate growth. Instead, the congregation was able to focus on reaching a solution that kept their values and beliefs at the center of their focus. This is possible, in part, because their religious professional, William, is only a part-time worker. William even alluded to this when he discussed his role in the process. I recognized that the crowding was going to be an issue just because I was having a more difficult time getting around to talk to my friends each Sunday, but I didn’t know when or if it was going to be dealt with. I guess I would have tried to do something eventually, but I just

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didn’t have time to worry about it right then with everything else going on, and in the end, they really didn’t even need me, which is fine.

People are willing to participate heavily in the decision making process at Faith, because they understand that William is not a pastor in the traditional sense. Furthermore, while they perceive William to be fair and generous, they also understand that those attributes do not guide this process. The reason the process is open to being shaped by the congregation is not because William happens to be a nontraditional pastor, but because William is prohibited from being a traditional pastor. William indicates that if he had had more time, he would have probably done something himself about the growth issue, and his pastoral training suggests that his decision making process would likely have placed the attraction and retention of new members in the forefront. Instead, the congregation arrived at a decision which privileged their values of community and openness. The final decision may or may not have been the same in both cases, but that hardly matters. What is important here is that the congregation made the decision without direction or input from their lead pastor. Eliminate Feedback Loops

Another key feature of Emerging Church governance, along with volitional strategies, is the elimination of feedback loops. A feedback loop is the process whereby organizational goals are continually reassessed in light of new information generated by organizational activities in order to maintain equilibrium and reduce complexity (Robinson 2007). Most often these loops take the form of reports or other transmissions of information up the organizational chain. A prominent feature of nearly every traditional organization, feedback loops are normally used as mechanisms of control. The most effective feedback loops are built into the official policies and procedures of the organization. In the congregations I visited, however, there was often an explicit attempt made to eliminate these loops structurally. The major complication in the structural elimination of feedback loops is that many Emerging Churches are still run by their founding pastors. At some point, a conscious decision must be made by the pastor and the congregation to pursue an organizational structure which effectively disempowers the pastor in particular spheres. The pastors that I spoke with endorsed such a structure on the grounds that the congregation would be worse off if they had to be informed of all or even most of what was going on at any given time. The pastor at

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Crossroads, for example, was very explicit about linking institutional control with knowledge. When I asked him if he knew about most of the things that go on at Crossroads he laughed and said “ No, I’m sure, in fact, that more goes on that I don’t know about than I do know about. I have no need or desire to know most things. Stuff just works better that way. The problem with traditional churches is that they kill innovation by controlling everything.

At first glance, this is not dissimilar from what one would find in a large bureaucracy. Those at the top of an organizational hierarchy rarely know everything that is going on in an organization. The difference, however, is in access. Control in organizations is not always exercised directly. Often, the threat of surveillance is enough to ensure that only particular kinds of activities occur (Foucalt 1977 [1995]; McKinlay and Starkey 1998; Reed 1996, 1999). Feedback loops which are not exercised still retain a certain measure of power to control and “kill innovation.” In large, bureaucratic organizations, people in positions of power have structural access to feedback loops even if they are not being utilized. If someone should decide that he/she should be informed about activity in a particular area of the organization, the organizational resources exist to start such a process. However, my respondents indicated that that there was an attempt to eliminate the infrastructure necessary for a feedback loop to exist at all (e.g., chain of command, regular reporting schedule, standardized information format). The flow of information in the congregations in this study was almost always limited to specific projects. In other words, only those people involved with a particular undertaking would be in on the cycle of information. Exceptions were made for decisions and activities which affected the entire congregation (e.g., moving from one building to another, hiring a new pastor). Thus, not informing leadership staff of a particular project or action is not viewed as an act of insubordination or resistance. Typically, there was not even a standard channel or procedure for a group to inform the pastor or leadership staff of an activity. There was simply no committee or meeting which handles such items. The lack of structural mechanisms for keeping the pastor and leadership staff informed of all or at least most of the congregational activities stands in stark contrast to my respondent’s experiences at other churches. Many of my respondents reported that in their previous, more traditional church experiences, the congregational activities were

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organized from the top down, developed by the leadership staff. The only way to exercise any control or authority within the organization was to work oneself onto a committee, and even then, the pastor often had the ultimate, final say. Jessica explained that she really likes Calvary precisely because of the ability to be involved according to her desires and skills. Yeah, it’s really great because I mean…traditionally it is just this one guy like running the whole thing or he’s got his committee or whatever. I’m not happy being a pew sitter. And you know, at so many large churches you have to earn your time. You have to go through all the special 101, 201, 301. All the classes. I had been in The Vineyard for 15 years and he was still trying to get me to go through all those again, and I was like “I’ve been a Christian since I was four. I probably know more than you and could teach you under the table but you want me to take all these courses, and I just think that sucks.”

The idea that Jessica expressed of a church led primarily by one “guy” was common among my participants. Several reported that a pastor at one of their previous churches was viewed as the CEO of the congregation, a designation which was off-putting to my respondents. In the first church Tony attended after college, the pastor referred to himself as the CEO of the congregation. Tony was stunned by what he felt was the incompatibility of the for-profit world and the religious world. As he indicated earlier in this text, the principles of the former are not really consistent with the values of the latter. Accordingly, authority in these congregations increased as one moved up the organizational ladder, producing a paternalistic relationship between the church staff and the congregation which many of my respondents viewed as unhealthy. Structurally isolating leadership staff from the knowledge and production of many of the organized events and activities of the congregation effectively allows for more congregational freedom. Congregants feel as though they have the latitude to engage in and produce activities that are important to them. Jeremy illustrates precisely how important this freedom is for his continued attendance at Incarnate Word. “I really feel like more of a valued source [than at my old church]…It was amazing because it was like they really accepted every gift. So it was just really cool. Now I’ve been here for over five years.” During my time in the field I witnessed multiple events that were organized and run entirely by the congregants, often without the knowledge of the pastor or leadership staff. These activities included

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everything from weekly meals to discuss the sermon message to movie marathons at the church building. Experience Over Credentials

Of course, congregational leaders do emerge, however, but their selection proceeds along distinctly different criteria than one might normally expect to find among leadership staff. Traditionally, formal training is used to signal the ability of a person to handle a particular set of tasks. In religious environments the designation of ordination serves to signal to people that a person has been trained sufficiently to handle the variety of jobs and duties that are routinely performed by pastors. The credential serves to institutionalize the person’s qualifications and remove any questioning about his/her abilities. In fact, ability ceases to be the determining factor in both hiring and firing processes. Instead, congregations and pastors talk about “fit” or “call” as all are assumed to have the basic skills due to the credential conferred through the process of ordination (Chang 2004). However, in the Emerging Church, these credentials are not the sole or even the prime way that people are evaluated for particular positions, or to do certain work. Instead of credentialed training, value is placed on personal experiences. Many of the congregations in this study recognize some form of elders and/or deacons within the congregation. The importance of experience over formal training is seen most acutely with these people, who are the recognized leaders of their congregations. Jimmy, a pastor at Crossroads explained the roles of deacons and elders to me this way: Interviewer: How does the deacon and elder system work at Crossroads? Jimmy: It’s not like I’m really the pastor of the church or that Tim and I are the pastors. There are pastors that we have who are not necessarily paid, but they are just as much pastors as I am. And it’s not like they have to be a deacon first before they become an elder, but I mean obviously a part of their DNA is that they do serve but I think that the elders are really the pastors of the church. And it’s very similar with the deacons. They are the people who are already pastoring the church and they should be recognized formally as such and brought into the conversations that are regularly unfolding between the elders as pastors. Interviewer: And how does one become a deacon or an elder?

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Jimmy: Well they are the ones who are already doing God’s work in the community. We don’t have a set of criteria or special course you can take. It’s basically when someone is already serving and it is brought to our attention by another deacon or elder or congregation member. Again, it’s really a way we recognize people who are currently pastoring the community through their actions. You know the old saying, “Faith without action is useless.” Well this community really tries to live that out and place a high premium on actions.

This idea that the leaders of the church earn such a designation based on their experiences and actions rather than on official training was echoed repeatedly during my time in the field. While Jimmy referenced James 2:17 (“Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead”), Megan, along with several others, mentioned Luke 6:44, (“You will know a tree by its fruit”) as their ideological justification for privileging experiences and actions over credentials.2 There is also a practical reason for placing “a high premium on actions.” As Jimmy’s quote above illustrates, there is no disputing a person’s “fit” for a congregation after a person has repeatedly demonstrated through actions that he/she is committed to the community. Additionally, because of the nature of these congregations as intentionally residing outside of the mainstream, there is a fear that professionals who go through a traditional credentialing process will not be able to be effective in such an Emerging Church setting. Frances, the founder of Incarnate Word in San Antonio, identifies the struggles ordained pastors have in Emerging Churches when she describes the difference between her role at Incarnate Word and the pastor’s role at Resurrection, Incarnate Word’s parent church. Resurrection is pastor driven so we’re a little different because we’re lay led…And not being ordained, I don’t have it drilled into me that I have to be the [voice of authority or provide all the direction] because I notice that with Joel [the pastor of Resurrection]. He makes a lot of the decisions for Resurrection. I don’t do so much of that.

Frances goes on to emphasize that at Incarnate Word they utilize a team of elders to make decisions, and that none of the elders are ordained despite the fact that every week several ordained pastors attend the service.3 As she indicates in the quote above, Frances believes that this not only makes Incarnate Word unique within her denomination, but also better for their community. Frances’s statements are backed up by other members of the congregation who enjoy seeing decisions made as a group and

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responsibilities for even common organizational procedures shared as a group. Amanda recounted that [t]hey’ve asked me to organize the worship service this week just so that we as elders are sharing the responsibilities. You know overall it kinda looks the same but it there is always a different twist to it just because different people do it at certain times and so it you know you can bring your creativity into it. We have a really cool creative group so it’s neat to see gifts being used in that way. We change things around so people don’t really know what to expect. We really value each other’s gifts a lot. Like if we see that there’s someone new to the community and we see that they really have the gift of prayer then we’ll be like wow, yeah let’s see how we can encourage that.

In Amanda’s quote we see the advantage of distributing responsibilities among people who have demonstrated a commitment to the community. Rather than creating a pattern that only takes advantage of a few people’s skills, gifts or talents, Incarnate Word is able to utilize a lot more creativity in the worship service. Although it was not clear in my limited amount of time with the congregation how people signal or announce that they have a gift in a particular area, I can say that desire is apparently important enough to trump skill as worship elements are not always conducted or performed by the most talented person in the congregation. In other words, the best singer did not get all the solos. Importantly, there is no commitment to a particular liturgy or way of doing worship that is so often a part of pastoral training. This difference goes far beyond simply doing things differently for the sake of being different. Whereas the justification for traditional liturgies is theological, the reasons provided by my respondents when I asked them why they do worship without liturgies are much more practical. “It just seems to work for us” (Bill) was a common refrain. Ned, a seminary student doing an internship at Living Word, explained a similar dynamic to me regarding the professional training that he was undertaking and the decidedly nontraditional environment of his internship. I asked to come here because I came to seminary as a real skeptic. I’m still not certain that this is the best place for me, but honestly, I didn’t know what else to do. Being [at Living Word] is really a compromise. I like a lot of the different liturgical traditions but at school I’m only being trained in one. Living Word helps me to think about it in a different way.

Amanda similarly linked an inflexible liturgy to professional training: “I really like the creative worship services [of Incarnate Word] but I miss

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the high liturgy at my old church. But I feel like there’s room for both here where there certainly was not at my old church. The pastor at my old church would never do worship like this.” This idea of trying to mix multiple kinds of worship styles was commonly linked to a rather untraditional use of religious professionals. Not surprisingly, several of my respondents indicated that the time when they were happiest in the traditional church was when they were a part of a youth group as a child. Their experiences in youth group tended to involve relatively little oversight and a high degree of religious experimentation. It is important to note that as much as my respondents valued personal experiences, they did not think traditional pastoral education was completely without merit. The tension between the benefits of ordination, which they see largely as residing in increased knowledge, and the drawbacks of professionalization, which they see as routinization and institutionalization, are juxtaposed poignantly by Eric. Eric is a seminary student and volunteer at Faith. I quote him at length below, because it is important to understand how he deals with the strain of negotiating these two worlds of traditional seminary and an Emerging Church, which are at once contradictory and complimentary. The other thing that I realized was most people who go to seminary who are in an M.Div. program especially in a pretty established, not seminary, but denomination is that they just want to be a pastor. But there’s this kind of separation from lay and pastor. Once you decide you want to be a pastor you have to jump through all these hoops, go to seminary, do your contextual pastoral education, spend some time in a hospital as a chaplin, all these kind of things that you jump though, and I realized I was getting into that mindset even though I don’t have to do any of that. Me even going to seminary isn’t a required thing for me to be ordained within our church, but I wanted to do it. I wanted to learn a little bit. I could be a pastor at a church right now. I can serve in a way to help further community instead of being like, “Well once I’m done then I can do it the ‘right’ way.” That’s part of it too that I’ve realized that this is a part of my education just doing these things in the church. So that’s what part of what my role is at Faith. And it became an honorary volunteer pastor position at our church, because we do stress the priesthood of all believers a great deal. So we don’t want to stress that kind of divide that well we’re pastors and you’re not.

Eric clearly believes that there is a lot to be gained by going to seminary or else he would not be devoting his money and time to pursuing a degree when his particular version of Christianity does not require it for ordination or to serve as a pastor. Yet he is conflicted by the “hoops” that he must go through to get his degree. In this context, Eric is using

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the term “hoop” to refer to training that does not directly affect the congregation he wishes to serve. Again, we see the distinction between credentials and experiences. He notes the ability of seminary to provide an education which is useful, but he is conflicted by having to participate in activities which get him closer to the credential by signaling his ability to conform to the “right” way of performing pastoral duties, without providing opportunities to serve his community. Additionally, he bristles at the idea that, if he follows the traditional seminary path, then he will have to wait until he has been trained correctly before he can begin serving as a pastor. In order to begin to rectify this contradiction, he began serving at Faith for one of his practicum credits. Finke and Dougherty (2002) focus on both of these pressures, professionalization and congregational, and suggest that we can best conceptualize religious professionals as gaining two distinct types of capital during their professional training. Social capital refers to the networks, connections and resources available to a person due to interpersonal relationships formed, in this case, during the process of professional training. Religious capital, on the other hand, refers to “the degree of mastery and attachment to a particular religious culture” that is explicitly learned or signaled during professional training (Finke and Dougherty 2002:106). They differentiate religious professionals based on where their capital was formed, suggesting that these two kinds of capital differ based on whether or not they were accrued in formal seminary training. In findings that have much in common with institutional theory, they suggest that professionals trained in seminaries are more likely to have outward looking social capital and focus on specific training and rituals as opposed to personal religious experiences. They write that social capital developed in the seminary and through professional affiliations removes clergy from an exclusive relationship with the congregation to a larger, external social network…for the clergy, this closure is often seen as desirable because it contributes to a stronger profession and to organizational stability (Finke and Dougherty 2002:106).

Social capital gained by clergy who did not attend seminary, on the other hand, tends to be based more on local ties to the organization or community within which the professional works. Similarly, formally trained and credentialed religious professionals gain a much different kind of religious capital. This capital focuses on gaining a particular

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mastery over the knowledge and technical skills necessary to perform the duties of the religious professional while deemphasizing attachment experiences (i.e., spiritual development) relative to their non-seminary trained colleagues. This has the potential to create a certain amount of conflict when seminary training does not match up with lay values. The Emerging Church congregations in this study have implemented particular organizational strategies in order to garner as much of the religious capital that formally trained religious professionals bring with them, while limiting the institutional effects of the social capital that credentialed religious professionals develop. To be more precise, people in these congregations value the local social capital of non-seminary trained professionals. Finke and Dougherty (2002:1087) write that “without seminary training the boundaries between the clergy and the laity are more fluid.” This is very much in line with a group that has come to distrust institutional religious elements as illustrated consistently in the data above. So how, then, are leaders identified and trained in the Emerging Church? This is exactly the question that brought together the group of Emerging Church leaders for the meeting in Houston that I described in the preface. In particular, the issue that prompted the gathering was a concern that the only way people were trained for leadership roles was through informal apprenticeships. Training in this way invariably favors those people who have already established connections with existing leaders or who are willing to be assertive enough to create those connections. Although it is possible for current leadership to seek out potential apprentices, this possibility was dismissed as unrealistic given the time and responsibility constraints that leaders already have. The concern then, as expressed on numerous occasions during the gathering, was that the way training was currently constituted systematically excluded a large majority of people and concentrated power in the hands of a select group of people who were typically white and typically male. Such a situation is undesirable for a group of people who value the uniqueness of individuals and diversity in religious expression. The conference then, was an attempt to discern how other voices could be brought into the conversation in a meaningful way. At first glance, this might not appear to be a difficult task. Diversity programs have existed for years within other organizations and any of these initiatives, from quotas to affirmative action, could simply be adopted. However, because the Emerging Church has disengaged and avoided traditional religious organizations, solutions could not be as simple as creating a seminary or other training organization which

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placed a high premium on diversity. From the outset, there was widespread agreement that, as Damian, a pastor from Europe said, We don’t want to create an inflexible, top down, entity where we say a person must do these things, x, y, and z, and then they are officially trained. We need to create something which will be relevant for each individual person in their community.

This general ethos pervaded all the discussions throughout the week. Much of the time during the week was spent trying to figure out how to structure opportunities for relationship formation in a way which would not become programmatic. As I pointed out in the preface, on the very first day Mary pointed noted that “[t]here are two dangers. One is institutionalism and the other is success because that will push us toward institutionalism, and this will cause us to support things just to keep them going. All of the sudden you find yourself doing things that aren’t tied to your vision at all.” This group was very cognizant of the dangers institutionalization presents to the Emerging Church in general and their group in particular as the endeavor they were discussing, training, is often one of the first steps toward institutionalization (Scott 1991). This was not something they took lightly as many of them were ready to call off the whole idea if they felt that there was not a way to be successful without going further down the path toward institutionalization. Ultimately the conference ended with a unanimous call for further conversation. However, it was decided that these continuing conversations should take place in more informal settings, eschewing the power of collective action for the flexibility of individual relationships thereby making any concentration of power exceedingly more difficult. In the months that followed, a program gradually began to emerge out of these relationships which emphasized the different resources people could provide in their own local contexts with someone(s) acting as a networker who would coordinate these experiences for people who were interested in gaining a particular set of skills. Thus, someone interested in community building might find herself being connected with people from Germany and someone interested in inner-city ministry might be put into contact with a pastor in London. These relationships then would determine the nature of the training experience. In this way, the system is much more open, flexible and able to create unique experiences tailored to individual situations than traditional training methods while avoiding the institutionalization they dislike.

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The development of this training program is important not because of its effectiveness. In fact, it is still much too early to determine whether this will prove to be a good way to take advantage of advanced skills and knowledge while developing future leaders for Emerging Churches. What is important about this is not the end result, but rather the process. The knowledge and skills gained from real-world experience formed the core of the development process and the product. While the conference-goers agreed that theoretical or academic training could be useful, there was widespread agreement that such training could only complement experiential learning. Privileging experiential knowledge means that particular ways of doing things cannot become institutionalized as each person’s experiences are different. The importance of this can hardly be overstated for this group. Patti, the conference organizer, addressed this point on the first day when she said that she hoped the new thing would “have value instead of values” indicating that she wanted it to “be pragmatic, not dogmatic.” The metaphors that the group used to describe the program they were trying to create reflected this attitude as well as it was variously described as a “stream,” a “trail,” a “journey,” and “multiple paths.” Mary captured this on the first day when she mentioned in a small group that “Training in the Emerging Church is going to be different. I think it’s really going to be a winding journey, so I’m going to sketch out a few different roads or paths.” These metaphors were nearly always followed up with a quick qualifying statement or phrase to indicate that “the goal is not to create a ‘trail’ which leads to some destination, but rather to get people onto a ‘trail’ and let them figure out when to get off or stop” (Erica). Again, the emphasis is on intentionally trying to create inherently unpredictable experiences rather than offering highly programmed course of study. This group illustrates the importance of experiences over credential both in the way the conference was organized, with privilege given to local knowledge and personal histories, and in the product created, a system intended to increase access to experiential learning as a way of training future leaders. Called To, Not Called By

This emphasis on personal experiences extends to how these congregations conceptualized the religious call. Traditionally, religious professionals are called by a congregation to serve as pastor or in some other capacity. After a period of discernment, the pastor determines whether or not to accept the call. But the call by a congregation sets up a

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client-service provider relationship from the beginning where the clergy is seen to exist to serve the needs of the congregation, an odd position for a professional who has ostensibly been trained to serve God. Of course, seminaries must straddle this awkward line as well. How much pastoral preparation is devoted to serving God and how much is devoted to serving congregational needs? Obviously, the two are not necessarily discordant, but they sometimes come into conflict with one another. Should we use congregational funds to feed starving children or to build another, larger sanctuary or family life center? This tension is only further increased by the fact that the religious professional can be fired by the very people he/she is expected to lead. The tendency toward job preservation alone often tips the balance in favor of serving the congregation (Chang 2004). The expectation that the pastor will serve the congregation leads rather quickly to the institutionalization of particular routines and processes that are reinforced by professional training. Gary explains the difficulty he had, as someone trying to avoid institutionalization, navigating these tensions in traditional settings. I was at the church two miles from here for seven years, the church I grew up in, and every year I would say-I was the young adult pastorand every year I would say “Why are we doing a mother-daughter banquet? Why? Explain to me why we’re doing the mother-daughter banquet, like how does that extend our mission, the mission of our church, which was pursuing Jesus’ dream to the world, how is that pursuing Jesus’ dream for the world having a mother-daughter banquet?” Well, [the answer was that] the women on the women’s board would be so sad if we canceled that. So, when the pastors would exert power and do something like canceling a mother-daughter banquet, because I convinced them to, that has been going on for 20 years, people wouldn’t like that…I mean they’re expecting a motherdaughter banquet. And in fact a lot of the reason that they’ve hired clergy persons is just to make sure stuff like that happens. So, they are playing their role in the routinization of charisma by saying “We expect you to serve us.”

It is clear from Gary’s comments that the pressure to serve his congregation in a particular way came not only from the professionally trained clergy, but also from his congregants. Gary explained to me that he was not necessarily in favor of terminating the mother-daughter banquet. Rather, he just wanted to make sure that everyone knew exactly why the event was being done. In other words, he wanted to deinstitutionalize it.

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Gary brought this perspective to his job, in part, he argues because he did not have the full training of ordination. In the end, it became clear to him that the reason for the annual banquet had nothing to do with the stated mission of the organization. Instead, organizational resources were devoted to the banquet because both the event, and the way of determining the value of events in general, had become institutionalized into a congregational service model. Decisions were not made based on how/if they contributed to the organizational goals. Instead, organizational processes are conducted by service providers for the benefit of their clients. However, when the emphasis is placed on a calling to a project or a group, then these tensions are alleviated and the potential for the creation of institutionalized processes is lessened significantly. In the Emerging Church congregations in this study, people were not invited to a project or a congregation based on the skills or services they could provide. Instead, people came to work on projects or with people that they felt passionate about. This reevaluation of the religious call is particularly powerful when there is not a need for people to prove themselves prior to being allowed to follow God’s calling. Mark’s understanding of call is evident when he discusses why he attends Crossroads: You know I believe God’s put me here and sometimes I wonder, but I go. Even though sometimes I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of actually living out what we say, the fact that we really try and have belief backed by action is important to me. The fact that there’s a desire there means a lot. There’s a passion there for something different than just a religious system. Instead we want to create a place where people are valued for who they are and allowed to participate because they want to. Instead of evaluating them based on what they’ve done or can offer us. That keeps my hopes up.

Understanding call in this way means that there is not as much pressure on the religious professional to serve the congregation. Of course, congregations still have the ability to hire and fire pastors, and thus exert some control over them. However, a number of things mitigate this power. First, the part-time and voluntary nature of employment serves to dampen congregational oversight. As the old saying goes, “You can’t fire a volunteer.” Second, as I alluded to earlier, religious professionals occupy numerous roles outside of formal organizational positions. The congregation simply has little, if any, way of compelling these people to engage in any action in which they are not interested.

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Getting Things Done: The Labor of the Willing

The above mechanisms which strip away much of the power from religious professionals leaves an organizational vacuum in place. If the authority of professionals is circumscribed, then so too is their ability. In order to fill that void and organize congregational activity, the Emerging Church has developed a shifting basis of authority that relies on the labor of the willing to ensure that things still get done in the organization. Labor in religious organizations is typically organized according to a complex scheme with specific tasks and duties assigned to each person and/or position regardless of individual desire at a particular moment. In the congregations I visited, however, labor was organized according to personal inclination. Activities and events were not organized or put on by the church staff for the congregants, but rather the congregants organized events and gatherings for themselves. A labor force of the willing consists of three distinct components. First, activities are initiated by the congregants. Second, the activity is maintained without interference from the official church staff. Finally, in order to avoid institutionalization, the activity is allowed to end or dissolve when there is no longer sufficient interest. In other words, relying on a labor force of the willing means that programs are not continued because “that’s the way things have always been done.” The first key component for organizing a willing labor force is that events and activities are initiated by the congregation rather than by the existing church staff. This bottom up, as opposed to top-down, approach has vast ramifications for how resources are developed and allocated. Letting the congregation bear the responsibility for initiating and organizing events is in sharp contrast to the church traditions many of my respondents come out of where the church staff create programs for the benefit of the congregation. Often these programs are developed with input from the congregation, but rarely is the congregation responsible for ensuring that an activity actually happens. Indeed, that is often precisely what the church staff exist to do. The congregations in this study operate in a much different way. Mark, a deacon at Crossroads, described how it works in his congregation. At our church the leaders aren’t going to go ‘Well, we’re going to put on the programs and bear all the responsibilities,’ but they’ll go ‘Yes you really want to do that? You see that need? Then by all means man we’ll support you.’

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A key source of innovation for heavily institutionalized organizations has long been those practices which arise out of resistance to official procedures (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). These practices gradually become incorporated into the structure of the organization with sufficient technical and human resources devoted to their maintenance. With these resources, of course, comes institutional control. Successful implementation of a willing labor force means to keep control of congregational activities in the hands of the individual congregants so that they do not become incorporated into official church structure. In order to make this possible, these congregations employ resource focused staff. Official staff positions are kept to a minimum and their job descriptions rarely place them in charge of a specific congregational activity or segment of the congregation. These congregations do not hire people to be youth ministers, family ministers, or Sunday school coordinators. Instead, the staff are focused on resource development. This involves creating and developing resources that people in the congregation can use, rather than programs that they can attend. A good example of this is Bob, the building manager at Crossroads. I got a tour of Crossroads’ building from Bob who explained to me that the building currently hosts two open mic nights each week (one poetry, one music), an art gallery, a professional music and film editing studio, a coffee shop, a book store, a weekly farmer’s market as well as space for artists and classes all in addition to serving as office and gathering space for the congregation. Bob’s job as he explains it is “to make sure that people have what they need when they get here.” He does not do any planning of events. He does not target a specific audience. His job does not require any screening to ensure that there is agreement in ideology. He simply works to make sure that the space is being used, fees (if any) are collected, and that the resources continue to evolve to meet the needs of the community. 4 As Bob puts it, “I’m basically just here to make sure the space gets used as much as possible.” Scheduling is done a first come, first served basis, but Bob knows the general rotation of groups (e.g., open mic night for poetry is the first Tuesday of every month.). However, Bob told me that they make a conscious effort to be an available space for spontaneous or relatively spur of the moment events: “Of course, some resources are in more demand than others in terms of space and equipment, but we also recognize the importance of just having space available for walk-ins even if we know we could schedule it out.” In one of my trips to the coffee shop to conduct an interview, I witnessed this exact thing happening. A man walked into the coffee shop and asked the barista what time the DJ was supposed to start. The

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barista indicated that she had no idea what he was talking about and that she was the only one working that night. However, the congregant I was interviewing told them both that the DJ was supposed to start at around 8:00. When I asked if there was a schedule of events, my interviewee, Mark, said, Well, yeah, but we just set this up earlier today…That’s one of the things I love about this place. Come up here and just listen to some poetry if you want or speak some or read your stuff. There’s all kinds of random stuff. A few people the other night were upstairs watching a Battlestar Gallactica marathon, just hanging out together, and that’s one of the good things that can happen here.

Changing the nature of church staff from people whose primary duty is to consume resources to people who are charged with creating resources for others helps to encourage a labor of the willing and ensure that programs are not sustained simply because someone’s job, position, or prestige relies on the delivery of the program. When church staffs are charged with providing programs and services for congregants there is much incentive for such programs to become institutionalized as quickly as possible in order to justify the staff person’s existence and/or status. Decoupling staff and programming effectively removes this incentive and instead places a high value on those people who can make resources as open, flexible and available as possible. All of this must happen within constraints, however. As the example with Bob shows above, there is still some scheduling that must get done and some budgeting that must occur. The goal in these congregations is not to provide a completely blank slate to begin each and every day, to abolish all planning, but rather to structure in disruptions to routine. No organization can be devoid of routine, but these congregations do employ specific strategies aimed at making sure that the underlying reasons for engaging in an activity are always present. The unplanned event is a key way that these organizations are able to get widespread participation in congregational activities. It is important that we not confuse “unplanned” with another term such as unscheduled or unprogrammed. An unplanned event is a regularly scheduled activity where people arrive knowing basically what to expect. However, these events are not planned out regarding exactly who is to do or say what. A deliberately unplanned event in many Emerging Churches is the weekly worship. In these services it is not uncommon for tasks, both repetitive and creative, to be carried out by a

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person who was unaware of the role he/she would be playing when he/she walked through the door. A good example of this is from Incarnate Word which has what they call “creative worship” where supplies are provided for drawing or painting and people are encouraged to journal or be creative in some way during the service. For some people, that means actually sharing something with the rest of the congregation. Of course, this corporate participation is made possible by the relatively small number of people in the congregation (25-50 on a given week). However, this same strategy of the unplanned event can be utilized in larger congregations as well. At Living Word they have a tremendous percentage of the congregation who participates in any given service. In each of the six services I attended, there were between 15 and 20 people participating in the worship and 100-120 people in the “audience.” My observations about the large participation rates were confirmed in the interviews with congregants. Megan pointed out that the lack of planning and indeed the lack of even the potential for planning due to a very small and underpaid staff, meant that most people come knowing that they need to participate in order for the service to happen. We need everybody to participate in order for this church to run and given that our paid staff is not paid to an extent to where they can be making everything happen and there’s not this huge support system there so if the community doesn’t do it then this church would not happen. Because it is such a small church and it’s such a grassroots thing you do feel very compelled to participate and help actually make the service happen I think because it is like If I don’t do it nobody is going to do it because it is such a small group. I mean I’ve met so many people who were like “I went to Living Word three times and the fourth time I was serving communion.” I think that really appeals to people a lot more than just getting a phone call asking if you can sign up for a committee. I think it’s really obvious that if you want to participate there are opportunities to do that to connect with people. There’s no hierarchy or anyone who runs the show or anything like that. It’s easy to be engaged and plugged-in here.

The interesting thing to note about Megan’s comments are how she connects the way work is done to the kind of relationships that are formed. In her opinion, taking advantage of the unplanned event to compel the utilization of willing labor is a good thing because it promotes people feeling “engaged” and “connected.” The only thing my respondents seemed to know for sure when they arrived was that they better be prepared to contribute in some way.

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My fieldnotes and informal interactions confirm that these activities included but were not limited to routinized work such as greeting people at the door, serving communion, and setting up the worship space. On several occasions I witnessed people engaging in the creative work necessary for the worship service on little or no prior notice. In addition to the creative worships at Incarnate Word, one of the worship gatherings I attended at Calvary opened with the pastor asking the group what they wanted to do that night. While this is not interesting as an isolated occurrence, nobody reacted in a surprised or shocked manner. In fact, people were ready with suggestions even though they had no prior warning, indicating that this sort of thing might not be so uncommon. The unplanned event compels people who might otherwise not have the time or inclination to be involved in the planning of an event to be a participant and offer his/her talents to the proceedings. The unpredictability created by this strategy makes it very difficult to institutionalize any official position (e.g., Greeter, Communion Server, etc.), and thus, the routines and procedures that develop along with these official positions in mainstream organizations are avoided while relationships are strengthened. The final component necessary for organizations relying on the labor of the willing is that when enthusiasm for an activity dissipates, the activity must be allowed to end. On the one hand, there does not appear to be anything revolutionary about this strategy. Why would a congregation put on events for people who were not interested in attending them? However, organizational scholars have demonstrated time and time again that practices which do not actually aid in achieving organizational goals still manage to become institutionalized for a whole host of reasons ranging from tradition to professional training to the maintenance of organizational myth and ceremony (Powell and DiMaggio 1991, Meyer and Rowan 1977). Over time, a particular event can simply become “standard operating procedure,” something that is done because it is what is always done rather than something which meets the needs and desires of a particular group at a particular time. With a willing labor structure, however, regular activities or gatherings are allowed to end when the desires of the group change. There are little or no specific resources devoted to the activity so its termination does not have widespread ramifications. At Living Word there was a theology pub in existence in the winter before my fieldwork. When I arrived, the group had just recently stopped their weekly meetings at a local bar to discuss church and theological issues. Despite its popularity (10-15 people attended each

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week from a 150 person congregation), the group stopped meeting after the leader decided he did not feel like continuing to organize the event. Megan explained that, I really want everybody to have that sort of opportunity and right now is sort of a low point for that in the church and it’s been kind of up and down with the opportunities like the theology pub, I’m really sad that that’s not going on any more. But I understood the guy who was leading that did it for several years and then asked for someone to take over and nobody really stepped up to the plate and so that’s not gonna happen.

When I asked Megan if she could be the one to step in and organize the gatherings she said she could but that she did not feel like she had enough theological knowledge or time to make a weekly commitment to organizing the group. In these comments it is possible to see the tradeoffs an organization must make when utilizing a willing labor structure as opposed to a traditional labor structure. With the former, institutionalization is avoided, but there is no infrastructure in place to compel someone to organize activities for the good of the group. As Megan said, if nobody “step[s] up to the plate” then it is “not gonna happen,” no matter how many people are interested in attending. Fred describes a similar situation where an activity which could have otherwise been maintained came to an end because the organizer decided to step down. He identifies relationships as the mechanism which allows a willing labor structure to flourish. It’s so fluid when you’re so relational. When the relationships are the glue and you’re dead set against institutionalizing or you at least try to minimize the institutionalizing, the person who is doing the meditation class on Tuesday morning gets tired of doing it, and it’s done.

The example that he provides of the yoga class is based in a real-life situation at Faith. In the early 2000s, the pastor at Faith wrote a book wherein he described what a week would look like in their community, and one of the events was a meditation class. The book also included an invitation for people to come and check out the congregation and stay with one of the members if they wanted. When people showed up, of course, everything had changed. One visitor remarked that she had really just wanted to see a Christian meditation class, which, of course, no longer existed. In fact, as I look through the book now, there is very little of the specific programming that still exists.

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The Residual Influence of Religious Professionals

There are, however, some unintended consequences of the arrangement described above. For example, founding pastors still cast a long shadow over their congregations. A good example of this occurred during one of the weekly sermon planning meetings that occurs at Faith. The topics and thematic units for the weekly message at Faith are determined at an evening meeting during the week open to all people in the congregation. At one of these meetings the group of 24 congregants spent close to an hour brainstorming ideas for the topic of the next series. Early on, William had suggested working through the book of Joshua, but this was not met with much enthusiasm. As the meeting wore on and no consensus could be reached, however, William gradually steered the sentiment toward his idea until it finally came to a vote between covering Joshua or Samuel. My fieldnotes describe a process wherein the pastor ultimately wielded his charismatic authority to control the process. The other interesting thing to note about the process is the tension between the group’s values of democracy and equality and the pastor’s ability to get what he wants because of his authority. William opens the gathering by explaining that it has been a long day and he is really tired, and he looks noticeably tired…After much discussion, we settle on Joshua or Samuel and we go around and vote and it comes down that Joshua won, but only by one vote. Nobody seemed comfortable with this so they decided to flip a coin to decide and Samuel wins the coin toss, which is also unsatisfying. Then, the solution was that the pastor holds a number behind his back and tells the woman sitting next to him to guess what the number is, either one or two, but he doesn’t tell her what number stands for which book. She guesses 1 and he says no it was two and she get disappointed, and then he said “No, just kidding it was 1.” Then William says “So, are you okay with doing Joshua,” which is not the book that she wanted, she wanted Samuel. So really what it came down to in a very not so sly way was that the pastor was making a decision about which book to do. It’s not that I got the impression that he was particularly invested in which book to do or not do, but rather that he wanted to make a decision and move on. The rest of the group seemed willing to continue talking about it until a decision was made. Nobody else had suggested making a decision, but William wanted to move on. (fieldnotes)

There were several items on the agenda for discussion following this issue, and the group had been talking about which book to use for over an hour. The desire to move on at the end of a long day is

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understandable. In this situation, the pastor was the first and only person to call for a vote and push a decision even when the room was pretty evenly split. Although nobody else appeared to be in a particular hurry to end the discussion, nobody was willing to challenge the pastor’s decision in any way, and certainly not in any of the conventional ways described above. Nobody approached him personally and expressed dissatisfaction with the events of the evening, and there were not small, informal groups discussing what happened after the meeting indicating that these temporary, minor uses of authority are tolerated as an acceptable way of conducting business. Of course, nearly every person I interviewed indicated that such behavior would not be tolerated if it became the pastor’s regular way of conducting himself, but they all conceded that it does occur from time to time, and that, as long as the events are perceived as isolated incidents, they would not likely by met with resistance. As an investigator of the organizational dynamics of the Emerging Church, I was interested on the one hand in the respondents’ comments because, as I have established throughout this text, intentionality plays such a key role here. On the other hand, however, what struck me about the process described above is that nobody else could have done what William did in that situation. Nobody else could have ended the discussion by calling for a vote and rigging the outcome. Thus, William’s power in this situation extends far beyond just situations in which it is activated. Despite all the work that has been done at Faith and throughout the movement in general, power is still very much connected to status within the organization. It seems clear then that if the pastors of these congregations are truly serious about being a part of a congregation without establishing taken for granted routines, they would have to step aside. While there is some evidence that they are making these breaks in symbolic ways, I only saw one case where a pastor walked away from a congregation based on these principles. As it stands, most of them are currently trying to straddle this divide which might ultimately be unsustainable. As William indicated above, while he would ideally be able to take his income completely from sources outside the church, he does still have a family to feed, and this external income is attached to his position as pastor and founder of Faith. While he may not wish to be funded by the congregation, his financial future, at least for now, is still inextricably tied to his position at the church.

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Conclusion

Relying on a labor force of the willing effectively serves to relocate authority away from the centralized position of a pastor or leadership team. Instead, authority in the Emerging Church is much more dispersed and shifting. Some congregations actually make this a part of their worship structure, a time which is typically reserved for the pastor to espouse his/her thoughts on the issue at hand. Fred remarks that [t]he thing that seems to switch up the most now is who’s speaking and what the topic is. It’s not just William (emphasis in original). Like this Sunday William will bring in someone who he thinks probably has more expertise in an area, which again is so different from the churches I’ve been to in the past where the Pastor is going to give his two cents on whatever the topic is, mental health or whatever, versus bringing in someone who has studied it for thirty years and getting their perspective on it. I prefer that because to me it lends a lot more credibility to what’s going on. You’re really allowing the experts to be the experts at what they do rather than pretending that the pastor can become the expert on every topic under the sun. Stem cell research. How many pastors do you see going crazy about stem cell research? And probably the only thing they know is what they read from Dobson. Don’t get me started on him right now.

Fred’s comments are an interesting for several reasons. First, they reflect his partiality for a shifting basis of authority as a way of engaging new information with people in his congregation. It is important to him that dialogue be the central process for structuring this shifting of authority because it results in the voicing of multiple understandings in addition to the pastor. He expressed no desire to replace or eliminate the pastor’s voice, but at the same time, he did not want it to be “just” William either. This is more than simply a panel discussion, however as the dialogue between the speaker and the congregation is the central interaction. Additionally, it is clear that in general Fred has a preference for consuming multiple perspectives rather than letting the pastor be the sole voice filtering and interpreting information. It does not particularly matter that knowledge is the criteria upon which people are selected. For Fred, it lends credibility, but he was the only one who mentioned this as a crucial factor. Others appreciated the different voices because of the perspective they brought to bear on the topic as someone with an abundance of experience, status as in the community, or particular background. Mark, a seminary student, told me,

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I really appreciate hearing how other people deal with their struggles in life or in faith, because it is often similar to what I’m going through or have been through and hearing them talk about it helps me to think about it in a different way. Especially when the women talk, because so often in the church in general it’s just a very male perspective all the time.

What is important is that the criteria for selection are open to the entire congregation. This act of bringing in an outside expert is such a common occurrence at Faith that I observed it firsthand later in the day that I had talked to Fred. William asked several experts in the topic for the week, mental health, to aid in the discussion at the weekly worship service, and all but one of the speakers were people who attended the weekly discussion group and volunteered their services. These groups are typically open to anyone. Indeed, the group even asked me if there was something I could contribute at the worship discussion even though it was my first time attending. My respondents were very aware that authority worked differently in their congregations than it did in other churches they had attended. Not only were they aware of this difference, but it would be difficult to overstate its importance in their decisions to attend an Emerging Church. It means that there is a place for them to contribute to conversations and events that are important to them. Further, they see it as a mechanism for producing a more informed and honest dialogue where people are able to use their skills and knowledge to aid in the group’s faith development and exploration. Just as they advocate for an ideology which cannot be pinned down, they also work to ensure that authority in the church is fluid as well. Guarding against organizational stagnation through the use of the strategies discussed here helps them to maintain this disequilibrium that they find creates a more authentic religious environment. Even as they work to complete the necessary organizational tasks, there is a welcoming of disruption and an avoidance of routine. This is clearly not the most efficient organizational strategy in the classic sense of the term, but it is also clear from the comments above that the people in the Emerging Church are not concerned with creating classically efficient organizations. Instead, resistance to normal organizational procedures entails doing away with classical efficiencies. 1 Imagine, for a minute, how a suggestion to eliminate the weekly worship service would go over in a traditional, mainline denomination. It is, quite frankly, amazing that this option was even brought up and seriously considered.

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Passages are paraphrased and are recounted here as quoted to me from respondents. 3 This phenomenon is not uncommon at the churches I visited. Faith, for example, routinely had half a dozen or more pastors attending weekly gatherings. 4 The farmer’s market, for example, rents the space every week, a move which is necessary for tax purposes. In order to maintain their position as a non-profit organization they needed documentation that the farmer’s market is a separate entity from Crossroads. This, of course, affects the amount of square footage that Crossroads can claim to have taxed at non-profit rates. The farmer’s market, then reimburses the congregation for the difference.

5 The Appeal of the Emerging Church

What becomes abundantly clear from the preceding chapters is that the Emerging Church stands out in the religious landscape both for its ideological commitments and for its organizational structure. The antiinstitutional stance that forms the framework of the Emerging Church stands in marked opposition to the heavily rationalized organizations that dominate the field of religion. In Chapter 2 I explained why the Emerging Church has arisen at this point in history, but students of religion and organizational scholars alike will be interested in a slightly different question as well. How is it that the Emerging Church manages to persist? If the Emerging Church refuses to do the things which sustain most other religious organizations, why do they not collapse and disappear? The lack of a consistent organizational structure and the failure to articulate a coherent set of beliefs should, according to most organizational theory, doom the Emerging Church to irrelevance if not extinction. The overwhelming conclusion that one must draw from examining the movement is that while some people might view the lack of internal organization as a hindrance, it is clear that the Emerging Church succeeds because of this anti-institutional approach, not despite it. The notion that an organization must conform to the dominant forces in order to persist and grow is as old as organizational theory in the social sciences. Max Weber (2002 [1930]) was the first to note claim that the move to a single, dominant set of organizational practices based around efficiency was inevitable, calling the trade-off between success and homogeneity an “iron cage” which was inescapable. DiMaggio and Powell (1991) extend this analysis by pointing out that in our modern society the appearance of efficiency is at least as important as actual, technical efficiency in determining structure and practice. Their research 123

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is not a contradiction to Weber’s, but rather an extension. Their concept of institutional isomorphism extends Weber’s ideas to show how the practice and structure of dominant organizations is imposed upon other organizations in the same field. It is this process of institutional isomorphism that DiMaggio and Powell and other institutionalists claim makes homogeneity among organizations so difficult to avoid. Religious organizations are compelled through a variety of means toward this homogeneity. For example, in the competitive field of organized religion, congregants typically expect certain things when they show up to worship on a Sunday morning (e.g., a space dedicated to conducting religious services, a sermon or message, music, etc.). Anything that deviates too far from this norm risks alienating the majority of the people who are potential congregants. Competing for new members necessitates that a new church do everything it can to appear legitimate to potential congregants (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Additionally, organizational structures are similar in order to satisfy the constraints imposed by the U.S. government on groups wishing to qualify as a religious group for tax or other purposes. In addition to these technical forces, there are cultural elements which push religious organizations down this path. In the previous chapter we saw how the Emerging Church guards against the homogeneity imposed by professionally trained clergy. This process is viewed by institutional scholars as inevitable for stability and persistence. Anti-Growth Strategy

The rationale behind theories of isomorphism work from the fundamental assumption that the stability that comes through expansion and growth is a desirable outcome. However, the people I talked with were, not surprisingly, unconcerned with growth in general. Although they characterize themselves as “evangelical” in the broad sense, not one of my respondents indicated a desire for growth as it is traditionally understood. For example, none of them embraced the idea that the Emerging Church would become a new Christian denomination, and nobody could recount an instance of converting someone to their faith. At most they would point me to a congregant that they had invited to join them at worship and who had kept coming back. Even this relatively soft-pedal approach to evangelism was not very common. Instead, when I pursued this line of questioning, they referred me back to the concept of being “missional” that I discussed in chapter two. Consistent with that ideology, they were much more focused on letting

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the local context determine organizational size and activity, rather than an unquestioned growth imperative. This central theme of allowing the local context to determine the religious “product” was echoed by a congregation that had recently undergone a dramatic alteration in its day-to-day activity upon moving into a new space. Before Faith moved into their current building, they engaged in much different activities. Their pastor, William, explained it this way: William: We used to be in this warehouse where we had no community presence so everything we did was just for each other. You know, services and Bible studies, and social gatherings and such. Now that we’re in this neighborhood, we’ve sort of, I don’t want to say abandoned those things, but we don’t have a Bible study team any more. Instead we have people who run a computer skills training class and organize day laborers and temporary workers, because this neighborhood is, I don’t know if you can tell, but that’s what this neighborhood needs. So that’s what we do. We’re the same people for the most part, but our identity has shifted now that we’re here. Interviewer: Has that resulted in more people coming? Are you getting day-laborers on Sunday mornings? William: I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought about it. No, I guess not. I know we’ve had more people since we moved, just getting people from the new area, but I don’t think those programs in particular have brought people to the service. I mean, it’s not like any of them have been “converted souls” or whatever. Nobody has asked me to baptize them. But that really isn’t the point of what we do here. Look, I’ve met a lot of other pastors in regular churches who would say the same thing in an interview and then privately it’s all about the numbers, but I promise you, spend some time here and you’ll see. That’s not what we do. If people want to come, great. If they don’t, fine. We’re gonna keep doing the work we believe we’re supposed to do and that means being intimately involved with the people around us and trying to make the world a better place.

While William offers a laissez-faire attitude toward growth, this focus on contextualization has led to some congregations to adopt explicitly peculiar growth strategies. As individual Emerging Church congregations gain members, they are inevitably faced with a dilemma about how to reconcile their desire to be contextual with maintaining an open and welcoming atmosphere. Noah, the pastor at Fellowship church, explains that they employ an “anti-growth” strategy.

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We don’t really have a growth plan because of it, and there’s something very sweet about it. I think a lot of churches start out like this and then end up growing and then there’s always a person who is in and out and never gets connected and it’s hard to notice them in a large church, but we don’t have a growth plan per say. In fact, we always tell people that we have an “anti-growth” plan. I mean, it’s not like we would turn people away, but we aren’t necessarily looking for new members either. And that’s not say that people haven’t come and gone, it just means that we’re really conscious about not sinking any of our limited resources into church growth. Because ultimately, this isn’t about our church. Most of us have been in congregations like that and we didn’t like it. If we grow, fine, but not if it comes at the expense of spending our time and talents in the community.

While other people did not put it in quite the same anti-growth terms as Noah, this sentiment for dealing with growth by intentionally trying to avoid activities which encourage growth or expansion was not uncommon. An extended example from Crossroad helps to illustrate this mindset. Crossroads occupies a series of large buildings that had formerly been a church in a downtown, urban neighborhood. A few years prior to my visit, the pastor and his family had purchased the space with the intent to live in it and renovate the buildings. Pastor Jimmy: We got a great deal on the land and the buildings because they had been sitting unused for so long. We didn’t really have any money, but we had felt called to work in this community for a long time so we decided to take a chance and scraped together what savings we had and moved out here. Once we actually moved in we realized that it was worse than we thought. It’s like, the idea of living in a old church might sound kinda cool, but this place just hadn’t been touched for so long just like everything else in this part of town. So it really took the better part of year just to get it to where the city would let us let people in. We had wanted to move the congregation here right away, but we just couldn’t get permits or insurance because the building was in such bad shape. The great thing is that renovating it really allowed us to make the space into whatever we wanted.

Examining the space, then, is a telling indicator of exactly what types of things they value. The grounds of Crossroads still contains the pastor’s residence where he lives with his wife and children, but there is also a coffee shop, a community garden, space for artists to work and meeting rooms which are open to the public. It is all very thoughtfully laid out to encourage maximum usage, with one very interesting exception.

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The worship hall is one of the most unique spaces I encountered during my research. Laid out in a “V” formation, the congregants on one side of the room are blocked from being able to see the congregants on the other side of the room by a large wall that runs down the middle of the “V.” The worship activity happens primarily at the tip of the “V” where the two sets of seats join, so everyone can see what is going on. Knowing how intentional people in the Emerging Church are about their use of symbols, I asked Jimmy if this arrangement was on purpose and if so, what it symbolized. Pastor Jimmy [chuckling]: Well yes, it’s intentional, I guess, but it’s not what you think. We actually forgot about the worship hall until the very end of the design phase and then we just kind of squeezed it in where we had room left. We thought about re-doing everything to center around the sanctuary, but that’s not really our focus here. Also, we started getting a sense early on that even though this location was completely across town from where we had been worshipping, that a lot of people intended to follow us over here. Once it became clear that this was going to happen, that people were going to drive across the city once or twice a week just to be here, we knew something had to be done, and this design helps us to do that.

However, Jimmy has a very different idea in mind than most pastors who might be concerned with people coming to their new church. Instead of trying to accommodate growth, he is trying to do the opposite. Crossroads normally worships around 150 people on a Sunday, but over the past few months that number had swelled to closer to 200 for two different services (out of an estimated membership of ~500), and it is entirely conceivable that more people might have come. At 200, the service is standing room only. What pastor Jimmy likes about the space is that it is limiting, not accommodating. He says that [i]t’s just not consistent with our values to have people driving in from the suburbs to go to our church for an hour or two or three a week. That’s just not what we want to be. Obviously we have a growth issue, but our response is that we’re not going to add more seats, and we’re not going to add more services. In fact, the second service that you attended this week is set to expire in a couple of months. The idea was to grow that service enough that we could, we have a person here that wants to start his own congregation in suburb just north of here, and we want the people who live around there to go to that church. Our plan over the next six months to a year is get smaller, not bigger.

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In other words, they were deliberately limiting the number of people who would feel comfortable in their space in order to facilitate a smaller community. As Jimmy points out, they have the physical space to worship several hundred people. With a few simple renovations, in fact, their current sanctuary could have been nearly doubled. But their commitment to being a local church meant that this kind of growth was undesirable when it occurred because of people driving in from out of town. Jimmy mentioned that if they get back to those same numbers again but with people from within the neighborhood, then they would absolutely entertain the idea of expanding their building or adding more services. Their anti-growth strategy, then, was fueled by their commitment to local service. Mark, a deacon at Crossroads, put it to me this way: Look, it’s not as if having these people come in from so far away is net neutral. It’s actually damaging to the community. You see the cars up and down the street taking up all the parking. It doesn’t take the most observant person to realize that the majority of the people in this neighborhood are non-white with minimal financial means, and here come all these white kids in SUVs trotting into their neighborhood twice a week because it’s “cool” to belong to an “urban” church. At least that’s the perception among the residents around here that I’ve been talking to. So we really had to do something if we were ever going to be serious about being in relationship with the people here. If we truly have a commitment to this place then we need to put their needs first, even if it means we don’t have as many congregants or as many resources. And I’ll tell you, I know Tim would never say this, but not having the money that the extra congregants bring in hurts. As someone who helps to oversee the budget, it’s nice to have that little cushion, but the people around us don’t have that cushion and there’s no reason we can’t fulfill our mission without it. It’s just so different from other churches where I’ve been an elder or on the board or whatever.

What is perhaps most interesting about this situation at Crossroads is the sophisticated level of thought and attention that goes into decisions about limiting growth. It is clear that it takes as much, if not more, intentionality to avoid growth and get smaller as it does to get larger. The demonstrated commitment to the local neighborhood that I saw in the Emerging Church pays off not in the form of more members, but in the form of the ability to do the work they desire to do. As Mark points out, they couldn’t retain their current members and be committed to their local neighborhood. Institutional theory suggests that in most cases,

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the increased income and legitimacy that comes with a larger size would win out, but that is decidedly not the case here. Messiness

In addition to foregoing the stability that comes from size, people in the Emerging Church intentionally invite unpredictability into their congregations. Most organizational activity, even in the field of religion, is designed to maximize the control of resources an organization has available. Although religious entities are theoretically using these resources for communal good rather than personal gain, the institutional logic is still very much the same as in for-profit organizations. The antigrowth strategies discussed in the previous pages paint a decidedly different picture for the Emerging Church. Rather than trying to maximize control over resources, they are actively looking for ways to allow their surrounding environment to control them. Fueling this resistance to traditional growth is a commitment to being involved in local communities even at the expense of mainstream values is what my respondents refer to as “messiness.” Messiness means being involved in other people’s lives and letting their lives affect your own. The state of “messiness” is the desired mode of operation for people in the Emerging Church. In 2005, Tony Jones, then the national spokesperson for Emergent Village, told PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly that the heavy focus on relationships and questioning in the Emerging Church creates this messiness: “I think, theology as it works itself out in the lives of human beings who are kind of scratching and clawing their way to try to follow Jesus on a daily basis. It’s a messy endeavor, and I embrace that messiness.” To embrace the “messy endeavor” that Tony Jones refers to means to understand the stops and starts and failures and successes as part of journey without attempting to cover up the things that did not go as well as planned. More than anything, the term as my respondents used it means to value the experience over and above the outcome. This theme of messiness came up often in my interviews as a way to express a very particular kind of commitment to entering into the types of relationships that people throughout this book have argued are so important to them. For example, when I asked a husband and wife who hosted weekly gatherings in their living room why they preferred this kind of church to the other, more traditional congregations they had been a part of, they suggested that the messiness was actually part of the draw.

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Husband: People [in other churches] don’t want to talk to each other. They don’t want to have other people in their lives. Wife: They don’t want to be messy. Husband: And it gets messy. Wife: It’s messy, but we need to allow people’s messy lives into ours. Interviewer: How does it get messy? Wife: Well when you’re open and involved in the community, if you’re committed to that, then you kind of operate on that schedule. You know, the way we read the Bible doesn’t really make it possible for us to respond to God’s call and live these perfectly controlled lives. Husband: Yeah, we really think God wants us to have time for other people even if that means letting go a little bit.

When I pressed them further why it was necessary to allow other people’s “messy” lives into their own lives, they both suggested several passages from their reading of the New Testament that they believed called them to be in relationship with other people as a way to experience God and do God’s work. In other words, the very theology of persons in the Emerging Church necessitates that they be willing to encounter messiness. This stands in marked contrast to the dominant model of organized religion especially as practiced by the suburban megachurch. As the quote from Scott Bader-Saye reminds us in chapter 1, people in the Emerging Church prefers to bring religion into the world rather than to create a separate world. Not only a part of their belief system, messiness, as a value, is also embedded in the material reality surrounding the people in the Emerging Church. The physical structures that are a part of the Emerging Church not only facilitate these “messy” interactions, but indeed demands them. To use language more appropriate to the sociology of religion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to be a free rider when you are sitting on a couch in someone’s living room, as many congregations do. Tony suggested that this is exactly the reason that he found himself at a house church while he was in seminary studying to be a pastor: Tony: I just couldn’t help but notice that here I am, studying to be a pastor where all my professors are training me to run some fictitious large congregation or do some mission work overseas and I’m getting more out of sitting in a loveseat in my friend’s basement twice a week

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with a bunch of people I just met a couple of months ago. The atmosphere in the basement is just so much more intimate. You really get to know people instead of just what people think. The term they use for it is messiness, but I keep coming back to vulnerability. There is a real sense that we can’t hide behind ideas. Doing church where you bring your own, personal life into everything and you can’t really check out of any week makes you so much more vulnerable. I guess that’s what they mean by messiness.

For many of the reasons that Tony articulated, Emerging Churches tend to eschew the kind of infrastructure necessary to support large, impersonal congregations. Instead, they tend to meet in houses or coffee shops or even other churches outfitted with couches in a big circle. This is true even of the larger congregations. Faith, for example, even with several hundred people at a worship service still retains a worship setting that looks more like an exhibit in a hypothetical museum dedicated to the history of comfortable seating than a traditional church. Dozens of sofas, loveseats and armchairs fill a vast sanctuary in a variety of arrangements that change based on how the congregants move them around from week to week, usually after the worship gathering in order to talk to one another, play games, or corral small children. The function of avoiding the semi-private space of an owned religious building (as that is what most churches are—not quite public space in practice, but certainly not private) in favor of either the much more public (coffee shop) or explicitly private (house church, in someone’s home) is to put the focus of squarely onto the lives of the people present and to free up resources for community endeavors. DIY, DIO

This focus on relationships and experiences as opposed to the traditional organizational goals of growth and resource accumulation mean that Emerging Church appeals to a decidedly different kind of person. As Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger (2005) point out in their book Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Culture, these are not people who avoid organized religion altogether. In fact, they want to be a part of a worshiping community that does things communally and holds each other accountable. In other words, the Emerging Church is not simply Church-Lite. Instead, as Megan, puts it, we can more effectively think of the anti-growth, messiness embracing, Emerging Church as a DIY religion. “I mean it’s kind of like Do it Yourself church, but it definitely makes me feel much more connected

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and much more engaged in the whole process and connected to the people there.” The mindset of the people in the Emerging Church is that they don’t want to be passively consuming a religious product. Where the institutional church offers a readymade religious experience that congregants can consume, the Emerging Church offers a readymade opportunity where people can choose to create. This is a distinct and important difference, because it means that these two different kinds of church are attracting two different kinds of worshipers. Ethan explains this difference acutely when he talks about how he and his family worship at different places: Ethan: I had always gone to my parent’s church-they go to a Lutheran church- until just about a year ago. They still go there, but I told them I just couldn’t do it anymore and that I needed to find something different, something where I could be more involved. They tried to tell me that there were tons of programs at our church and all I had to do was sign up. That should have been my first clue that they didn’t get it. Then they suggested that I try the Methodist church right next door to our church! I still don’t think they understand why I’m here at all. Interviewer: What don’t they get? Ethan: Mainly that those churches are all the same to me. Going to, like, a Methodist church or a Presbyterian church was not going to solve anything. It’s not like I dislike the Lutheran Book of Worship or something. I mean, I did, but I would have disliked the worships at those places just the same, you know? It’s as if I told them I didn’t like pie, and they said, “Well have you tried cherry, yet?” I don’t have to try every kind of pie to know that I don’t like pie. Interviewer: So what’s different about this place? Ethan: There are no programs here. There’s just people who do stuff that I’m interested in. It’s almost like there’s no church here when the people are gone, in a way. We make the place and if we don’t like something we change it. We suffer sometimes because of that. I mean, there could probably be more direction, but we get by and I actually think we do a lot more good in the world with way fewer people than my old church.

Ethan’s experience is emblematic of the way people in the Emerging Church tend to talk about the institutional church. The difference between individual denominations or between congregations in the same denomination not seen as significant. As Ethan said, those churches are

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“all the same” to them. This is a big part of what makes the Emerging Church unique in the religious landscape. Typically, when people switch churches or denominations, they move to one that is very similar to their own (Roof 1989). But moving to the Emerging Church from the institutional church necessarily involves making a big transition. Several of the people I interviewed who had worked in the institutional church made this point very clear. As insiders in their previous church they are well situated to compare the differences between the two. They overwhelmingly conclude that their skills and experiences in the institutional church are of little use in the Emerging Church. Parker worked in several different congregations as a youth pastor as his family moved around the country for his wife’s job. He is currently unemployed and they attend an Emerging Church. It is their first experience at an Emerging Church and he is volunteering as a youth director of sorts. He summed up the difference from a practitioner’s viewpoint this way: Parker: It’s weird here, in a lot of ways, for me. In all the other places I worked I just basically did the same thing in a new place. Sunday school, lock-ins, Wednesday night programming and the occasional retreat, camp or service project. It got to where I could plan a ski trip in my sleep. But here, I mean, I’m not even paid here, and I have to work twice as hard just because this is all new. Absolutely zero of my skills transfer into this new position, but that’s what makes it so fun for me. I know they’ll never be able to pay me here. There’s not even a desire from the congregation to get to that point, but I imagine I’ll continue to do this even if I do manage to find a paying gig at some other church. Interviewer: Why would you do that? Parker: Well it’s just a different set of people here who are so much more interested in doing things rather than having me do things that they can come to. These people would be uninterested in having me plan everything. So it keeps me on my toes.

Just as Parker expressed above from the standpoint of a congregant, Parker explains that people in the Emerging Church are fundamentally different from people in the institutional church. He reinforces the points made throughout this text that people in the Emerging Church desire to be highly involved in all aspects of the organization. In other words, the Emerging Church exists for people who are looking for a different experience of organized religion than what the institutional church has

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to offer. The Emerging Church does not exist as a threat to the institutional church but rather as an alternative. This means that we can effectively think of the recent development of the Emerging Church as similar to the resurgence of farmer's markets, fair trade shops, co-operatives, and even downtown revival plans. It is not that these entities attempt to compete in a direct way with the megaliths that dominate their respective industries, but rather that there is a recognition that Wal-Mart does not and cannot satisfy everyone's shopping needs precisely because of its size and bargain basement prices. Similarly, the Emerging Church is not in competition for the same congregants as megachurches. People are drawn to the Emerging Church exactly because it is not a large, bureaucratic, consumer driven experience. It is, or at least attempts to be, a fundamentally different kind of religious experience catering to a very particular clientele. Placing the Emerging Church in a larger social context, we can look to the rise of what Charles Leadbetter, a social critic in the United Kingdom, refers to as the Pro-Am (professional-amateur) movement. He notes that while “the 1990s were a decade in which large corporations were rampant…the rise of the Pro-Ams suggests counter trends were at work as well” (2004:9). While the 20th century was defined, in large part, by the rise of professionals, Leadbetter argues that the 21st century will be determined to a significant degree by the contributions of unpaid and uncredentialed amateurs with professional standards, networks and commitment. In his2004 article, “The Pro-Am Revolution,” he describes how serious, nonprofessional work is dramatically influencing everything from astronomy to the arts. The Emerging Church gives us a glimpse into what this movement looks like in modern, organized religion and suggests that elements that might have been thought of as a hindrance such as lack of money, credentialed professionals, and organizational infrastructure are actually a boon to creating the space for Pro-Ams to flourish. One of the movements that Leadbetter documents in his work is the dramatic increase of Pro-Am astronomers. Many of the recent advances in astronomy have been credited to Pro-Ams working without benefit of top-notch equipment, university support or a professional organization. While the initial impulse might be to try and organize this group of people into some coherent body which can make more efficient use of resources and knowledge, the lessons of the Emerging Church suggest that instead, this group is likely to benefit from support of a different kind which involves less regulation, fewer rules and, perhaps, few collectively agreed upon goals. What this kind of a system lacks in classic efficiency is made up for in attracting very dedicated and talented

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people with exceedingly high standards to the field. Nobody would advocate that these kinds of Pro-Am should supplant traditional organizations, but rather that developing both is in the interests of everyone in society. Rather than providing an evangelical roadmap, this research should be taken as a signal of a growing trend in American Protestantism in particular. As cultural sectors become more and more highly guarded by professional gatekeepers demanding credentials for participation, we see a subgroup that, rather than struggling to attain these qualifications, simply eschews them altogether in favor of an alternate route. In a more general sense, then, the Emerging Church can be seen as part of the tendency in modern society of some people turning away from monolithic, rationalized organizations in favor of a more contingent, contextual, and DIY mentality. It seems important to understand that phenomena like the Emerging Church operate as a kind of third choice between participating in traditional religious structures and simply opting out of organized religion altogether in favor of an individual spirituality. In this sense, then, it seems more appropriate to characterize these efforts as a DIO (Do it Ourselves) approach. The Emerging Church is full of people who have chosen to remake corporate religion into what they want rather than giving up on it completely. Niche Market

The previous half-century has witnessed the consistent marginalization of this particular kind of believer by the institutionalized church, and collectively these people now make up a distinct market of potential congregants. In short, there is a substantial niche market for Emerging Church congregations. The niche that the Emerging Church occupies is one where the main requirement is a willingness to engage with others in the production of meaningful religious activity, an activity that is ultimately defined by the participants. The lack of traditional organizational structure in the Emerging Church allows this kind of activity to take place. Although none of the congregations in my study would admit to actively, consciously courting this market, they were attracting these people all the same. While the data indicate that this niche market does exist, it also shows that the people who make up this group of potential churchgoers are very savvy and particularly distrustful of anything which appears manufactured or “inauthentic.” In other words, one could fill a large congregation with people from just this niche alone, but probably not by trying to since that would be perceived as overly contrived.

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The data presented here indicates that the Emerging Church is able to achieve success by taking advantage of this unique market niche. The niche as a theoretical concept is borrowed from biology and ecology and means more than simply a static environmental arrangement. In a review of niche theory, Popielarz and Neal explain that “the niche of a species is the set of environmental states in which it thrives…The sociological analog typically is the organizational form” (Popielarz and Neal 2007:68). Thus, a niche fundamentally implies a web of relations and activities with consumers as well as with other organizations and regulatory agencies. In this way, it is highly compatible with institutional explanations of organizational activity. Blau, Redding, and Land (1998) and Simons and Ingram (1997, 2004) both find support for the argument that ideologies counter to mainstream or dominant ideologies can be successful in garnering material returns if those ideologies target and attract a unique and particular niche market. Niche theory suggests that in order to survive on the basis of a small market position, an organization must occupy a relatively unique position within their environment with correspondingly little or no overlap with other organizations (Popielarz and Neal 2007). As we see above, organizational theory suggests that the drive for material incentives will always trump ideology, and ideology will change to accommodate and justify the material outcomes (Simons and Ingram 1997). However, the situation is much different when a particular organizational arrangement allows an organization to capture and create a distinct portion of the environment’s resources. A unique organization can continue to exist and thrive as long as the resource gains made by adhering to a particular ideological configuration are unique and unreachable any other way. If a particular ideology allows an organization to capture an otherwise inaccessible segment of the market then that organization will be able to maintain a unique ideological component in spite of institutional pressures compelling them to conform. The Emerging Church illustrates this point neatly. Settling on an institutionalized organizational form would theoretically pay immediate dividends in terms of an increase in access to resources, especially in the form of organizational members. The isomorphic pressures to conform and articulate an identifiable ideology, then, are very strong. Refusing to offer an articulated, consistent ideology, makes it more difficult for the Emerging Church to gain legitimacy and increases the pressures to conform to dominant norms. Isomorphic forces are greatest when the gains to be had from conforming are the largest. However, my data suggests that resistance and legitimacy can coexist when organizations

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gain acceptance not in spite of an anti-institutional position, but because of this position. In other words, the project of resistance must be the thing which allows the organization to attract resources, and the members of the organization must be cognizant of this fact. This is true in the case of the Emerging Church organizations in this study. Instead of resisting dominant structures simply for ideological gain, they are able to avoid conforming to dominant structures because of their ideological stance which allows them to gain resources that the dominant organizations are not able to obtain. As my respondents point out repeatedly above, it’s not that they chose the Emerging Church over a different church. If they were not at an Emerging Church, they would not be at church at all. It is the particular composition of the Emerging Church as committed to a kind of ideology and structure discussed in the previous chapters that appeals to them. This arrangement is fundamentally unavailable in the institutional church. Thus, the Emerging Church is able to take advantage of this unique market niche where an “inefficient” organizational structure actually becomes a strength rather than a liability. The Emerging Church shows that anti-institutional organizations can survive and thrive by capitalizing on those market segments which their would-be competitors cannot capture due to structural barriers. This leaves a group of people who are predisposed to accept the Emerging Church as the only possible choice. Thus, resisting the institutionalization of organizational elements functions to ensure the survival and success of the Emerging Church by appealing to a built in constituency. Creating the permanently unsettled lives discussed in chapter three does more than simply increase the potential options for religious expression. It serves an important strategic purpose as well. Where conventional organizational theory would suggest that isomorphism leads to stability and success the Emerging Church indicates that a different kind of success can be achieved by resisting institutional pressures and occupying an intentionally unstable position at the margins of the religious landscape. These findings conflict somewhat with standard niche theory suggesting a refinement to take account of the niches created and occupied by resistant organizations. Popielarz and Neal note that among the most fundamental components of niche theory is the assertion that “the process of change disrupts the organization’s routines, power structure, and internal and external networks, which should raise the likelihood of organizational mortality” (Popielarz and Neal 2007:72). Of course, I find just the opposite outcome, that the process of change to organizational routines, power structures and internal and external

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networks can actually lead to a decrease of mortality for alternative organizations especially when the alternative would mean competing for resources with bigger, more established organizations in the same field. Emerging Churches are able survive because of these disruptions, because their organizational form intentionally creates these disturbances. The DIY mentality of the people who make up the Emerging Church necessitate that the movement is in a continual state of flux. Without the disruptions, and the subsequent institutionalization that would occur, Emerging Churches would not be able to compete effectively for the dechurched people who currently attend Emerging Churches. Instead, they would be forced to compete for the same resources as mainline denominations and megachurches with an organizational structure ill-suited for such a task. In this case then, stability would lead to decline, not survival. It is not so much that these findings disagree with theorists who find that changes and shifts of niches inhibit organizational persistence. Rather, the evidence from this study suggests that this is not the case with all organizations, particularly with organizations which resist institutionalization. This is perhaps the biggest insight that we can gain by examining the Emerging Church in relation to other, similar phenomena. One of the things that distinguishes Pro-Ams and other grassroots movements is a common sentiment that they would be even stronger or better off if they had more resources. There is a lamentation that more resources would really go a long way if we could get them to these people, or if they were just better organized. The story of the Emerging Church shows that this is not necessarily the case. Two of the congregations in this study are affiliated with mainstream denominations. The home churches provide what is known as “covering.” In other words, they lend both financial support and spiritual credentials. At Living Word, for example, their ability to serve communion is only possible because the pastor at the home church blesses the communion elements (wine and bread) each Sunday morning before they are transported over to Living Word’s worship space across town. Only a couple of the people I talked with (and none of my interviewees) even knew that Living Word was affiliated with a mainstream denomination. None of the congregants I talked to felt that the communion blessing from a pastor who is officially recognized by the denomination was necessary, but since Living Word technically qualifies as a mission extension of King’s Cross, it is officially part of the larger denomination and so it must conform to certain norms. However, it is not the case that these larger organizational structures are entirely benign. When I would ask my respondents how they felt

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about this, they generally expressed the same kind of resentment as Melinda, who argued “Well that’s just stupid. Like, this guy across town has to say some magic words so we can do communion here? That’s dumb. I’ve read the Bible. There were no seminaries in the New Testament designating who could and could not give communion.” Even the leadership team at Living Word, who understood why the situation existed told me that although it was necessary, it was less than ideal. George: Yeah, it’s not really what we’d like, but we can’t afford this without their help, so we kind of have to do what they say until we can get on our own two feet financially. The communion thing is just one part of it, but there are other things we have to do to. Paperwork stuff, like we are supposed to count the people who show up to each event which we don’t do. Stuff like that…I mean, how do you explain to a bunch of people that I spent part of my time this week running an impromptu drum circle for a bunch of high school kids I met outside our building last week? Like, there’s not a box for that on my timesheet. But we have to figure out some way to justify it if we want their support, which we need.

Contrast this situation with the set-up at the fully independent congregations in this study and it becomes clear how incompatible an institutional structure is with the desires of those in the Emerging Church. The restrictions imposed on Living Word by their home church seem relatively small in relation to the support they receive, but even in these little things one can see clearly how different the two organizations are, or at least how different they desire to be. As one can imagine, when I asked other Emerging Church pastors and leaders about documenting their time on a time sheet or in some other way, the response was typically laughter. Jeff, the pastor at Calvary said, laughingly, No, man. Who would I even report it to? And what would it tell them that I spent 4 hours yesterday in a coffee shop reading a book and talking to people? I worked in a congregation like that. You just end up documenting that stuff as ‘professional development’ or ‘outreach’ or something like that, and it doesn’t really mean anything. What do you do with that information besides compile it and report it? We don’t have time for that.

The limited resources available and the lack of feedback loops in the Emerging Church makes that kind of organizational infrastructure not only unimportant, but counterproductive. While institutional churches might have the resources to devote to monitoring how resources are used

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in order to determine where to best allocate funds and time, the Emerging Church congregations I visited do not work in the same way. Organizational funds are not distributed in a top-down manner, and thus do not need to be justified in the same way. Those kinds of justifications, which make complete sense in the institutional church, are actually damaging to the project of the Emerging Church. This is perhaps one of the biggest insights that we can gain by examining the Emerging Church in relation to other, similar phenomena. One of the things that distinguishes grassroots movements is a common sentiment that they would be even stronger or better off if they had more resources. There is a lamentation that more resources would really go a long way if we could get them to these people, or if they were just better organized. The picture that we get from the data here suggest that more traditional resources and a “better” organizational structure would actually hinder the development of the Emerging Church and deter its ability to attract the dechurched, the very niche market that make up the bulk of Emerging Church. Further, the DIY spirit that infuses the Emerging Church means that the idea of resources takes on a different meaning. The kind of support these organizations need to truly flourish is substantially different than the kind of support needed for a new Methodist church or even a young nondenominational congregation. Limitations

There are obvious limitations to an anti-institutional model with regards to sustainability. Although Emerging Churches have been around for some time, they are just now getting to the stage where they have to deal with the kinds of infrastructure issues that inevitably confront new religious movements or sects. As the movement grows or persists over a long period of time, how does the congregation meet the needs/desires of its congregants as they move through the stages of life? Perhaps the biggest issue confronting the congregations I visited was the issue of childcare. While the organizational ideology and resources do not support a staff of people to do childcare during services or to provide youth specific activities and instructions, these are increasingly the things that congregants need as the Emerging Church “grows up.” The life station of the congregants in the movement was on full display through the conspicuous absence of teenagers or other school age children, even though there was a noticeable number of young children (0-3 years) at many services. The issue of resources devoted to these children and their parents may be a significant factor in determining the shape of the movement as

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it moves forward. Harmony noted the tension between her needs and the ideals of the congregation when I asked her about taking her young son to church We used to belong to a group that we just loved, I guess you could call them Emerging or whatever, but they only met on Wednesday nights which we just can’t do anymore with my son, Marcus. We still see those people, but not for worship. This place is better because it’s Sunday morning, but it’s still hard because it seems like either my husband or I are always trying to keep Marcus happy and can’t really focus on the service. As a group we believe in inclusivity and I truly believe that nobody feels put out by us having Marcus there, but some weeks I know he’s distracting. We’ve talked a lot about it as a group and what we’re going to do. I don’t know how it will turn out, but there are times, yes, when I look at churches with all the childcare resources you could want, and I’m tempted to return to those places.

Throughout my time in the field, I was continually astonished at how often my respondent’s actions matched up with their beliefs, so I am inclined to believe that they will find a way to work out this inherent tension between their desire to be inclusive and to avoid institutional elements that might be necessary for people’s participation. However, it does not seem out of the question that, in the long term, the Emerging Church simply becomes a middle stop for Christians between the churches of their youth and the family friendly churches of adulthood. The kind of work described in this chapter takes a tremendous amount of time and dedication to sustain and it would be naïve to not be at least a little bit skeptical of people’s ability to sustain this over the long term. While this in and of itself does not diminish the importance of the organizational strategies and appeal described here, it does begin to hint at some potential boundaries which might limit the effectiveness and/or appeal of anti-institutional organizations. Conclusion

The Emerging Church manages to persist as an alternative to mainstream religion because of its unique market position which allows it to attract people who are dissatisfied with the dominant organizations in the field. While it might be tempting to think of the Emerging Church as an oddity or an outlier, to do so would be to seriously misunderstand the social forces that both created and continue to provide support for this kind of organization. Just as other dominant institutions produce their own “others” in the for-profit fields, the dominance of a highly

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institutionalized and rationalized model of religion has produced the Emerging Church. It is important to understand this movement, then, as connected to those other “others”—the farmer’s markets, the popularity of thrift stores, the Pro-Am movement. Not surprisingly, many of my respondents incorporate those things into their lives as well, sometimes explicitly connected with the Emerging Church. Both Crossroads and Incarnate Word, for example, host their own farmer’s market. These congregations, situated in relatively poor parts of the city where fresh produce can be hard to come by, see this as part of being missional. Both places explicitly connected the desire to support a farmer’s market with larger issues of food security. Frances explained that “[t]hese people really have no access to good, cheap produce. We saw that as a problem so we started talking with local farmers about coming here once a week.” Similarly, Tim at Crossroads told me that [t]his neighborhood is really isolated by the highways, you kind of have to know the history of the city to completely understand how it happened, but regardless, the closest grocery store is a 20 or 30 minute bus ride. We understood the need, because we live here and we were tired of making that drive. We started talking to other people and it turns out they were tired of it, too.

Embracing these anti-institutional elements went beyond being missional for many of my respondents, however. When arranging interviews, I always let the subject choose the location, telling them to pick a place where they would normally hang out. This strategy took me, variously, to a flea market, a used-book store, and countless coffee shops. Importantly, it never resulted in a trip to the mall, a Barnes and Noble, or a Starbucks. In other words, the orientation toward anti-institutional structures present among congregants in the Emerging Church pervades other parts of their lives as well. One begins to get an understanding of these people, then, as a distinct type of person rather than simply a distinct type of religious person. While the Emerging Church may be a unique alternative in the field of religion, it hardly occupies a unique position in the larger social arena. Thus, the niche that the Emerging Church occupies in the field of religion likely exists in other fields as well. The Emerging Church offers some important insights, then, for organizational scholars who are attempting to understand how an organization can persist indefinitely between institutionalization and extinction. Most observers would agree that the institutional forces in

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the field of religion are powerful, and my data do not suggest any different. Where there might be a refinement to the current understanding of how institutional pressure works is in a reconceptualization of exactly what those pressures produce. While they certainly result in a strong incentive to adopt common structures and elements, they also form the foundation and fuel for an organization to exist explicitly in opposition to those common institutions.

6 Sustaining Faith, Sustaining Resistance

While the notion of a religious group developing out of dissatisfaction with dominant religious institutions is hardly new or noteworthy, the profile that emerges from the chapters above is of a set of congregations which employ some very distinctive organizational practices as they engage in the centuries old process of breaking away from established institutional structures.1 Certainly the Emerging Church looks and acts very differently than the vast majority of religious organizations in the U.S. But there is more that we can learn from examining the Emerging Church than simply a one-off description of a rather small religious movement. The organizing principles embedded in the everyday practices of the congregations discussed in the previous chapters suggests that there is something much more systematic, thoughtful and generalizable occurring in the Emerging Church. The common mechanisms for resisting institutionalization employed by these congregations means that we can conceptualize the Emerging Church as belonging to a type of organization that endeavors to avoid taken for granted routines and set procedures. This is explicitly contrary to the actions and goals of most religious groups. Typically, the overriding goal of religion and religious institutions is to become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of a person or society’s daily existence. As I detail above, the common use of religious professionals, creeds, and rituals among other elements all serve this central purpose while bringing people together in a shared religious experience built around a common belief system or shared experience. The strategies, actions, and beliefs practiced and espoused by those in the Emerging Church, on the other hand, indicate an attempt to build and sustain a church based on difference and tension rather than on agreement and dogma.

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In this final chapter, I suggest conceptualizing the Emerging Church as a resistant organization. By this I mean an organization which intentionally employs strategies that seek to resist the dominant institutional pressures while pursuing mainstream goals (e.g., growth, persistence). For example, it is relatively easy for small sects and other religious organizations to avoid becoming institutionalized, and this is often a stated goal. However, the prevailing organizational theory, as I discuss in chapter 1, tells us that those groups will face significant and insurmountable challenges as they try and achieve legitimate mainstream goals such as growth or persistence. Organizations which do manage to resist or avoid institutional pressures for any length of time are typically regarded as not having faced these pressures yet or treated as outliers if they are and garner relatively little attention (Oliver 1991). However, by identifying the core principles found in the lessons of the Emerging Church, we can see how organizations can both resist institutionalization and persist across organizational fields. Conceptualizing the Resistant Organization

In the years following the initial publication of “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” DiMaggio and Powell (1983) have separately recognized that they painted an overly simplistic picture of institutional conformity. Both have amended their earlier stance to allow for the possibility and necessity of resistance as fields become overly structurated and options for consumers become limited. They largely attribute resistance to existing institutions as the source of innovation for both organizations and fields while maintaining that any innovation which arises from such resistance would of course be immediately subjected to isomorphic forces (DiMaggio 1991; Powell 1991). In other words, there still exists a dichotomous view that the world consists of those social practices which either are institutionalized or are not yet. While this conceptualization adds a degree of sophistication it still does not open the door wide for the possibility of an organization which attempts to resist institutionalization on all fronts as it seeks to persist and grow. This highlights the dilemma with most explanations of organizational resistance to institutionalization. Namely, theorists focus on the response of organizations to one kind of pressure while keeping intact their assumption that members of organizations desire and work toward, or at least do not actively resist, having their organization institutionalized in other respects.

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While the literature largely fails to deal with these kinds of entropic or resistant organizations, some insights can be gained by examining the limited empirical and theoretical work done surrounding organizational resistance. Christine Oliver’s (1991) article, “Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes” stands as the only major work in the field that addresses institutional resistance to a significant degree. She seeks to demonstrate that, contrary to most institutional scholarship, “conformity is neither inevitable nor invariably instrumental in securing longevity” (Oliver 1991:175). Oliver conceptually identifies an organizational strategy of defiance that includes organizations which respond actively to avoid institutionalization altogether. Scott notes that “defiant organizations not only resist institutional pressures to conform, but do so in a very public manner” (Scott 1995:29). This “public manner” can take the form of dismissing or ignoring institutional pressures, challenging institutional pressures or attacking institutional pressures. Further, Oliver points out that these organizations may “make a virtue of their insurrection,” and are more likely to challenge existing rules when members feel they have a more efficient method of achieving organizational goals (Oliver 1991:156). It is important to note that “efficient” here is not limited to technical means. Oliver allows for a more culturally efficient organization as well. She gives the example of rights activists who hold current laws or practices in disdain because of ideological differences. As we have seen in the chapters above, cultural efficiency applies to the field of religion as well as the Emerging Church constructs an oppositional organizational culture. While Oliver’s typology is useful, it is not without criticism. She astutely points out that “institutional theory is unable to explain the continuing reappearance of alternative [organizations] that attempt to make a virtue of their active departure from institutional beliefs and commonly held definitions of what constitutes effective action,” but she does little to remedy this situation as she focuses much of her attention on organizations which are already highly institutionalized and simply resisting pressures to change even more (Oliver 1991:156). This comes from a fundamental flaw within Oliver’s theory, namely that she largely fails to take into account the ability of the institutional environment to shape the realm of possible responses an organization can make (Scott 1995). Indeed, an organization which truly resists institutionalization is not one which seeks to create its own patterns, but one which seeks to make the patterns themselves subject to constant criticism and interrogation. Resisting institutionalization fundamentally means to do away with taken-for-granted assumptions about how to organize.

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This problem, however, is not limited to Oliver’s work and indeed continues despite her substantial, though incomplete, efforts to remedy the situation. In a review of recent, empirical work on alternatives to institutionalization, Scott (2001) gives examples of studies ranging from work on the tobacco industry (Miles 1982) to corporate response to EEO/AA legislation (Dobbin et al. 1993), to university budget and accounting systems (Covaleski and Dirsmith 1988). Each of these studies began with a highly institutionalized organization and examined how its members were able to resist external pressures. There is no attention given to organizations which resist institutional pressure as a whole. As Chang (2003) points out, this is characteristic of the institutionalism literature in general, and is particularly problematic when applied to the study of religious organizations. While the existing institutional scholarship takes an institutionalized field as its starting place and analyzes the external pressures which lead to conformity, Chang (2003) argues that religious organizations often have unique internal cultures which determine their direction and help them to avoid regulation and conformity. The internal ideological dynamics that make up organizational culture and identity in religious organizations make for marginal religious groups which have more in common with other peripheral and highly politicized organizations than they do with mainstream religious denominations and organizations. Rather than analyzing these congregations as waiting to die out or become isomorphized into the larger religious field, we should be examining them as a unique group with peers in other fields. The problems with the scant literature on organizational resistance are surprising given that examples of purposefully non-hierarchical organizations abound in the sociological literature in general and, to a much lesser extent, in the organizations literature. Scholars have focused attention on everything from utopian communities (Kanter 1968), Israeli kibbutzim (Ben-Rafael 1977), the Mondragon worker collective (Johnson and Whyte 1977), Quakers (Dandelion 1996; Moore 2000) and feminist collectives both within and outside the context of a social movement, new or otherwise (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Staggenborg 2001; Taylor and Whittier 1992). These groups are typically very similar to the Emerging Church detailed here, but the literature has largely revolved around the effectiveness of decentralized organization for achieving group goals, as opposed to examining the effectiveness of this organizational structure for resisting institutional pressures in general (Leach 2005). Although these groups do not necessarily fall under the designation of resistance, they would certainly be a good place to start. 2

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Institutional scholars will no doubt be interested in understanding exactly how such an arrangement can be sustained over a period of time. While these data clearly do not have the necessary longitudinal aspects to answer that question empirically, we can gain some theoretical insight in this direction from Zucker (1987) who notes that one of the key insights of institutional approaches to organizations is that in the drive for stability promised by adopting institutionalized practices and structures, organizations not only miss out on more efficient alternatives but sometimes create their own inefficiency (e.g., “red tape”). As the chapters above demonstrate, the people in this study are interested in resisting institutionalized processes precisely because of Zucker’s point about “efficient alternatives.” They feel that avoiding institutionalization is a more “efficient” religious experience for them. Of course, most would likely never use the term efficient since people do not want to think about their religious experience in the same way as they think about vehicle production or fast food. But if efficiency means reaching organizational goals, then it is clear the people in the Emerging Church have decided that the best way to reach the goal of an authentic, inclusive and meaningful religious experience is by creating an organization which avoids the creation and maintenance of institutional elements. Recent institutional work draws from Gidden’s (1984) concept of structuration to point out that individuals interact with and shape their organizational environments in precisely the way that my respondents demonstrated (Scott 2008). This would give more credence to the idea that this kind of resistance can be sustained. The work of the people in the Emerging Church is clearly intentional, not accidental or coincidental. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that people will be able to continue shaping the organization in such a way that avoids institutionalization. Piecing together the various components that are utilized by the Emerging Church in the chapters above provides at least a starting place for developing a systematic theory of resistant organizations that can be empirically tested. Principles

There are four broad organizing principles that the congregations studied here adhere to in order to avoid institutionalization. While these congregations differ significantly along many other organizational components, they all share a desire to resist institutional pressures compelling conformity. First and foremost, the congregants exhibit a high degree of intentionality in their desire to avoid institutional

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organizational elements. This is consistent with existing institutional research which suggests that isomorphic forces are so great that they will take over without an explicit and intentional attempt to resist or expel them (Scott 2008). Second, these organizations structure in disruptions to what are traditionally taken for granted routines. This is typically done by tying organizational activities to a particular individual rather than to a set of procedures. Third, the congregations here go to great lengths to be independent and self-sufficient. Even when this is not logistically possible, great efforts are made to symbolically delineate the boundaries between the congregation and outside influences. Finally, the people supporting these organizations make up a broad, untapped market which cuts across Protestant religious traditions allowing the Emerging Church to access an otherwise unreachable group of people through an ideology of inclusivity. Intentional

If there is anything that institutional scholars can agree upon it is that the institutionalization of an organization in terms of structure or practice will inevitably occur without the intervention of organizational actors making an intentional, coordinated effort to resist institutional pressures (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 2008). Isomorphic pressure compels organizations to look like one another as the members seek to structure a more efficient organization or develop more efficient practices in order to be more competitive. Put simply, non-competitive organizations risk failure at the hands of more capable organizations. First, attempts to increase technical efficiency in a competitive environment can be a source of organizational homogeneity. The basic idea is that inefficient or unproductive organizational practices will be “selected out” of the marketplace as they fail to keep pace with more efficient activities (Slack and Hinings 1994:804). In a highly competitive environment, no organization could survive utilizing less efficient practices and procedures than its competitors. The result, theoretically, is the utilization of a relatively small set of highly efficient organizational practices and the continual development of more efficient technologies. This does not necessarily entail mimicry, but rather the independent development of similar best practices in organizations across a field (Hannan and Freeman 1977; Scott 1991). Second, in an effort to comply with both formal and informal laws, rules and regulations, organizations across a field may end up utilizing similar organizational strategies regardless of whether explicit mimicry is taking place. The quest for legitimacy, or the appearance of

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legitimacy, often compels organizations to adopt similar frameworks, and the constraints put on an organization to meet regulatory standards limit the range of an organization’s perceived responses. These regulations can force organizations to adopt practices that are not intended to produce organizational conformity but rather to meet regulatory guidelines and standards set by organizations that they are dependent upon. Similarly, normative pressures, often from trained professionals, can cause an organization to adopt standard operating procedures similar to those put in place in other organizations by similarly trained professionals without any conscious, organization-wide directive to become more homogenous. The norms and standards developed in professional training and maintained through professional groups and organizations acts as a homogenizing agent that does not rely on organizational intent for implementation. Of course, some forms of institutionalization which arise from these pressures are explicit attempts to copy the practices and structures of other organizations in a given field. However, this level of intentionality is not a necessary condition for isomorphism to have substantial influence on an organization. In fact, just the opposite is true. The scholarship is unanimous in concluding that isomorphism will occur “without monitoring and sanctioning by some ‘central’ authority” (Jepperson 1991:151). It becomes clear, then, that a necessary component of any organization’s attempt to avoid institutionalization is that the organization must be intentional about the project of resistance. This means both that people in the organization must have some sense of the various forces of homogenization and be intentional about creating organizational structures that avoid or resist them. In short, if an organization exists which is not institutionalized, it is not an accident. The relative success of the congregations described here supports these theoretical insights with empirical evidence. The recurring theme throughout the text above is that the people I talked with are very aware of institutional forces in their organization, from the use of professionals to power of ritual and routine. Not only are they aware of these pressures, but they are clearly trying to design ways to resist and avoid institutionalized routines. Indeed, I am as surprised now as I was upon hearing their comments the first time by the sophistication and depth of their understanding which often very astutely combines academic theories with local, contextual knowledge and developed intuition.

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Disruptive

The forces that organizations face have a great capacity for creating standard routines and patterns of action as well as for developing taken for granted belief systems. In order to avoid or resist these outcomes, organizations must have ways of compelling disruption. They must become organizations sustained by action. As Jepperson describes in his contribution to The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, “a social pattern is reproduced through action if persons repeatedly (re)mobilize and (re)intervene in historical process to secure its persistence” (Jepperson 1991:148). Social patterns which require ongoing bursts of human activity to be sustained stand in stark contrast to those processes which exist without individual agency and are thus institutionalized. Jepperson cites emerging democracies as political systems which often require ongoing human intervention to be sustained until they become institutionalized. We might also think of religion in this same way. The early days of any new religion are marked by a high degree of individual action as there is very little institutionalization. At this point, the organization is still susceptible to a high degree of volatility and change. Indeed the early accounts of most modern religions are largely concerned with forming an identity around institutional elements (Glock and Bellah 1976). As institutional scholars have long pointed out, most organizations seek to move away from a pattern sustained by individual action and toward a institutional reproduction because it results in more stability and, typically, longevity. What we see in the chapters above about the Emerging Church, however, tell us that some organizations endeavor to not only invite disruption into organizational life, but intentionally seek to create opportunities for individual action. This kind of organizational disruption can come from any part of the organization. For example, in chapter 4 we see from George at Living Word that organizational processes are tied directly to individual action because he is the only person who could do that worship. If he leaves or changes, the organization changes. In other words, the worship service is not institutionalized. From an ideological standpoint, the communion ritual at Faith achieves the same goal of creating ongoing disruptions. Structurally, an organization built around action rather than routine is one with little oversight, bureaucracy and red-tape. None of the congregations I visited exhibited disruptions in all areas, but a general spirit of action over routine was prevalent

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throughout the organizations. Tim a pastor at Crossroads explained how they make these trade-offs reluctantly: Tim: We would really rather just empower people to go and do what they need to go and do in order to do God’s work. At the same time, we understand that there are some things that really have to get done here so we can keep the doors open, meet certain regulations and such, attract a minimum amount of money and what have you. I really see a large part of my job as pastor as the buffer so that those things don’t get in the way of people being able to do what they feel called to do. It’s not really the role I envisioned for myself, but I’ve seen how those things can just take over if there’s not someone being vigilant about it. It’s not too long before people are putting the real heart of their work on auto-pilot in order to make sure we’re meeting whatever standards we’re supposed to meet.

As I have endeavored to show throughout this work, my respondents made it clear to me time and again that they were very aware of the institutional forces which they were resisting. Although they used different language than organizational scholars to express this understanding, it is obvious that they are identifying the same pressures that organizational theorists have detailed. In the case of Crossroads, we see an example of how a congregation uses this understanding in order to allow for individual action to determine organizational activity rather than institutional pressures. Independence: Strategic Decoupling

Organizations are also subject to isomorphic forces to the extent that they are dependent upon other organizations. This dependence can take a formal form such as is the case when the state imposes legal restrictions on a field, or can operate more subtly such as when organizations feel pressure to adopt structures or policies in order to appear legitimate (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 2005). Issues of organizational dependence are, at their core, made up of two complimentary forces, coercion and legitimacy. The extent to which an organization is intertwined with or dependent upon other organizations determines the extent to which they need to conform to these external norms and expectations. In other words, dependent organizations must appear as legitimate as possible. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) first identified this source of institutional change as coercive isomorphism. In their description of the sources of coercive isomorphism, DiMaggio and Powell describe the relationship between

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dependence and institutional pressures noting that “coercive isomorphism results from both formal and informal pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations upon which they are dependent and by cultural expectations in the society within which organizations function” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:150). The importance of conforming to uniform regulations and standards is not, argue neoinstitutionalists, about improving technical efficiency, but rather about signaling legitimacy to regulatory agencies, other organizations and consumers. While coercive isomorphism is commonly understood as the result of specific pressures exerted by one organization over another such as when a government agency requires particular accounting practices, the evidence from Covaleski and Dirsmith (1988) also illustrates what Powell and DiMaggio suggest about the various means by which coercive forces can act. That is, they “may be felt as force, as persuasion or as invitations to join in collusion” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:150). In other words, coercive isomorphism is not only the result of regulatory forces. Often the perceived threat of regulation is enough to pressure organizations to adopt similar practices. Other times, homogeneity is achieved when an alternative organizational form seeks to partner with a mainstream, bureaucratic organization. As the vast literature on alternatives to bureaucracy substantiates (Rothschild and Russell 1986; Shirky 2009), even organizations which are committed to being antihierarchical can quickly adopt some semblance of bureaucratic structure when necessary to signal legitimacy to outside organizations on whom they are dependent in some way. These interrelated forces of legitimacy and conformity due to real or threatened coercion must be mitigated in order for an organization to successfully resist institutionalization. As we see above, the key to understanding the amount of coercive pressure an organization will encounter lies in the organization’s degree of dependence on other organizations. Thus, in order to avoid the coercive forces and pressures for conformity that arise through a need to signal legitimacy, an organization must be as independent as possible. Specifically, the empirical work suggest that this independence must occur in two realms. First, any organization wishing to resist homogeneity must avoid regulatory powers as much as possible. Scott (2001) noted that regulation through force, inducement or authority is one of the foundations of institution formation. The key for resisting institutionalization due to the coercive forces of regulation, then, is not to eliminate contact with regulative agencies so much as to structurally and intentionally minimize or decouple

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regulative contact from technical functions. Decoupling as a strategy lies at the heart of institutional explanations of organizational change (Meyer and Rowan 1977). However, as Scott (1991) points out, thinking about traditional decoupling processes, where institutional elements are developed apart and kept separate from technical organizational elements, as a strategy for resisting institutionalization is troubling at best. Institutional structures always have an impact beyond the “ceremonial.” The difference between the traditional notions of decoupling that Scott rightly criticizes and what I propose here is one of intentionality. As I have explained above, traditional neoinstitutional theory posits institutional responses as arising without the intent of organizational actors. In other words, organizational actors need not make an explicit decision to become institutionalized. Decoupling as a strategy for resisting institutionalization, then, can only work if organizational actors are intentional and explicit about identifying which practices are institutional in nature and which practices are technical. If the decoupling process is intentional and explicit, then it makes it much more difficult for these ceremonial activities to insinuate themselves into the organization as taken for granted practices and thus, easier to walloff. Decoupling in the Emerging Church is practiced in both very concrete and symbolic ways. This is best illustrated with Incarnate Word and Living Word, the two congregations that are explicitly affiliated with a larger denominational structure which provides “cover” as discussed in above. For a variety of reasons, most Emerging Church congregations avoid keeping track of attendance at worship and other events. However, these two congregations were required to report attendance numbers to their home congregations. In both cases the congregations dealt with this regulation in a very symbolic way. Since they could not afford to simply ignore the request, they were very explicit about decoupling this activity from their own organization. In both cases a clear announcement was made that there was an attendance card coming around and that they were required by the covering congregation to provide this information. Further, it was stressed that this was not something that Incarnate Word or Living Word wanted to do, and they would not be using this information to make decisions in any way. This symbolic decoupling serves a very important purpose. It allows the congregations to take advantage of the resources of the cover church without giving over too much ideological control. Similarly, but on a much more tangible level, I inquired about how congregations meet the various legal regulations placed on non-profit

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organizations in the U.S. Calvary reported that they intentionally pay more than they need to in order to have these matters handled by someone outside of the organization, even when those skills exist within the congregation. For example, Jeff explained, In terms of the filing and tax requirements and all that, we try not to get too involved. We have people here who could do that stuff, and would be willing to lend their expertise. I’ve even done a bunch of that stuff at my previous congregations, just in terms of all the little stuff that you have to do. But we don’t really want that to be a part of what we worry about here. We’ve decided to spend the money to have someone outside the congregation look at that stuff for us and make sure we’re in compliance. Then we do what we have to do because we understand that we have to meet certain guidelines. But really, we just don’t want to spend our days thinking about it all the time. In fact, we explicitly avoid thinking about it, because we don’t think it’s possible to do God’s work as we see it and conform to all the regulations all the time. And truth be told, we probably spend more time out of compliance, but that’s okay with us right now.

Jeff indicates that the congregation, or at least the leaders of the congregation, have decided that it was a good use of organizational resources to devote money to something that they could have done for free in order to avoid the institutional forces. Even as Jeff recognized the need for nonprofit status, he explicitly frames those pressures as being at odds with the mission of the organization. Taking a different route, Pete from Fellowship told me simply, “Well, we’re not a non-profit entity. We’re not really anything, legally, I guess. We’re just some friends who get together and do stuff. We’re not like, looking for tax exempt status or anything like that. Really, that’s one of the things that drove us away from a building.” Again, one can see how the monetary cost is exchanged for ideological control. In addition to avoiding the reach of formal, regulatory bodies, resistant organizations must have a dispersed and diverse resource supply. This perspective draws heavily from earlier resourcedependency models of organizational behavior (cf. Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). In a review of the empirical literature surrounding institutional theory, Zucker (1987) found that in general, those organizations which are heavily dependent upon another organization for resources are much more likely to adopt structures and practices similar to that organization in an attempt to both signal legitimacy and ease transaction costs. There is good reason, then, to believe that having a diverse resource supply not only mitigates against the adoption and development of

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institutionalized practices and structures, but also that it might play a more proactive role as well. Diverse resource supplies are often an organization’s primary point of contact with new or different practices and structures which can provide contrasts and alternatives to traditional organizational models. Additionally, a more dispersed resource supply leads to more frequent, though smaller, upheavals and changes as firms restructure, die out, or change in some other way. It is reasonable to assume that these relatively continuous disruptions to regular routines and practices can serve to disrupt organizational activities that might become taken for granted. To take one illustration from this study, we see that congregations which lack institutional affiliation do not have a ready supply of professionally trained clergy ready to step in when a current pastor moves on or steps down. The organization is forced to change in ways that extend beyond simply leadership style. Often, upon the departure of a pastor or religious leader, congregations must re-imagine the position altogether if nobody with the same combination of experience and credentials is available. This was certainly the case with Fellowship. When their original pastor left, they were confronted with a void of traditionally qualified people and certainly had no ties to a system of seminaries that could readily provide qualified professionals. Rather than simply trying to fill the roles that the previous pastor had filled, they revamped the position completely. They formed a leadership team with a strict division of labor and collectively supported one member financially to take theology classes from a local divinity school in order. Their organizational activities changed significantly. Whereas before they had done things that revolved around the pastor’s strengths, they are now reformulated to take advantage of the unique combination of talents and time that the group held collectively. The members were on the fence about whether this was a better situation than before, but they were unanimous in agreeing that it was a different set-up than they had previously. This kind of resource dispersion has the ability to effectively decouple congregations from larger, more institutionalized bodies. Inclusive

The final principle that emerges from examining the congregations in this study concern the type of members that they cultivate and appeal to. At first glance it is tempting to place the Emerging Church movement closer to the liberal end of the strict church/liberal church divide that has garnered so much attention from scholars of religious organizations.

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However, to do so would be a bit misleading. The niche market that I described in chapter 5 does indeed cast a very large net as the Emerging Church looks to appeal to people who have become disillusioned with traditional church. In this way, the movement cuts across denominations and institutional affiliations, often within the same congregations. Perhaps more so than any other congregations, Emerging Churches exhibit a dazzling array of religious backgrounds. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that the movement has not been around long enough to produce any second generation congregants. There are very few adults today who count an Emerging Church as their home congregation during their formative years. However, there is more to it than that. The wide and shallow net cast by the Emerging Church manages to turn up a very religiously inclusive membership. In part for survival, but also for ideological reasons, the requirements for membership (and I use that term loosely as such a thing as official membership does not exist in most of the congregations I visited), are typically nil. In other words, in order to obtain the full benefits that the organization has to offer, one need not profess any particular set of beliefs, adhere to a specific set of rules, pledge any allegiances, or make any contributions of money or time in most of these congregations. The vast literature about free-riders in religious groups suggests that this is precisely the scenario that is unsustainable for smaller congregations and nascent religious movements (Iannacone 1997). These organizations are typically much too small to be able to support a drag on resources from people who consume organizational products and services without contributing to their production in some way. The typical response to avoid this situation is to compel members to make substantial ideological, time and/or monetary investments in the organization prior to gaining full membership. Such a situation not only allows for the sustainability of organizational products but also engenders more organizational commitment and camaraderie as members can be relatively assured that everyone in the organization is equally dedicated to the mission and general principles of the organization. Large congregations within established denominations do not have to worry about this as much because they have more resources at their disposal to expend on unproductive members. The Emerging Church turns this scenario on its head a little bit and in the process suggests a core organizing principle for resisting institutional pressures in general. Rather than requiring more from members in exchange for arguably better organizational products (e.g., access to a similarly committed constituency and message). The Emerging Church goes the other direction. Sure, membership is free, but

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you do not get much simply for signing up. The traditional theological messages available to most free riders are absent in the Emerging Church. They are not discouraged in any way, but they are simply unavailable in pre-packaged, ready to consume form. For example, one can join in on a typical Lutheran service on a given Sunday morning and be assured of receiving forgiveness of previous sin, a reminder of God’s love for you and a relatively coherent (depending on the pastor) theological worldview espoused during the sermon. Such is not the case in the Emerging Church. Each of those things might be offered, but only as they continue the conversation. There is no standardized product to consume. Indeed, the only real way to extract anything as stable as a theological framework out of the congregations in this study would be to engage in the conversation and decide for oneself what made the most sense. The people in this study routinely used that metaphor of conversation that I discussed in chapter 3 to describe their faith development as well. Rather than looking for a set of right or prescribed answers, they understood their faith as constantly under construction. Rose, from Faith, explicitly contrasted this with her experiences in at more institutional churches. I’ve been taking Catechism classes lately even though I’m not Catholic. I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure stuff out, you know? And I like that. It’s not this canned, one size fits all, don’t think for yourself stuff like I got in church when I was growing up. It’s harder, for sure, but it seems more genuine to me. Sometimes, I get frustrated and just want someone to tell me the answer, but I know that that won’t really work for me in the long run.

When I asked Rose if she expected to eventually come to some kind of stable relationship with her own faith, she laughingly suggested that it would be impossible to do that as long as she was at her current congregation because “new people keep coming in and messing with the stuff I think I’ve figured out.” In other words, while the barriers to entry in the Emerging Church might be low, the work required to obtain the things typically offered by religious organizations is extremely high. There is no donation of money that can ensure full participation, and there are not any books that can be read and memorized in order to advance ones understanding of the theology of the Emerging Church, if such a thing even existed. The only activity that can produce these things is time spent in relationship with other people engaging in the “conversation.” In some ways, then, the

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Emerging Church manages to require both the least and the most from its members as participating in relationships are among the most demanding requirement an organization can make. They require commitments of both time and energy. William summed this up neatly when he likened the Emerging Church to an empty store: “We’re like a store where everything is free, but there’s nothing inside. I mean, take all you want. But if you want to have something to take, you’re gonna have to go out back with us and build it first.” This kind of low barrier, inclusive strategy toward membership pays dividends for the project of resistance that the Emerging Church is engaged in. As people engage in the project of constructing and reconstructing their own faith systems, they rely heavily on those transported by others along the elements present in their own history. This variety of competing and examined elements necessarily helps to keep any one set of ideas or beliefs from becoming institutionalized. The Gyroscope

So how do we put all of this together? I have tried to show here how the people in the Emerging Church intentionally construct their organizations in ways that avoid and resist institutional pressures. Some of these strategies are enacted with greater success than others, but the foundation for some general principles of a resistant organization arise in the course of careful examination. Beyond questions of effectiveness, however, how can we conceptualize these efforts in aggregate? The classic organizational theory with regard to institutional pressures argues that we should think of the institutionalized organizations which dominate our society as “iron cages” where the drive toward rationality and efficiency restricts and limits individual actions. What then, is the appropriate metaphor for the resistant organization? It might be appealing at first to conceptualize the institutionalized organization’s opposite as a chaotic or anarchic organization without structure or guidelines. But such an arrangement would hardly qualify as an organization. The two terms-chaos and organization-are mutually exclusive. Instead we should think about the institutionalized organization, composed of taken for granted patterns and routines, as one type of organizational form and the resistant organization, which consciously opposes the forces that compel organizations toward conformity, as its opposite. As I have endeavored to show above, there is nothing particularly chaotic about the resistant organization. Instead, resistant organizations are guided by very specific principles and a

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desire to avoid institutionalization. For this reason, I propose that an apt conceptualization of the resistant organization is that of a gyroscope. A gyroscope is a spinning wheel which maintains orientation even as its axes spin freely in different directions. Gyroscopes are used primarily in navigation for maintaining the constant position of the traveling object relative to changing environmental conditions. Thus, they are utilized in missile guidance, shuttle navigation, and the everhandy compass. The gyroscope fundamentally relies on movement to be effective, inertia causes the most distinctive feature of the gyroscope, the precession or movement of the wheel around a freely moving axis, to give into other prevailing external forces, usually gravity. The mechanical laws of the gyroscope have been well explained since its discovery/invention in 1817 by Johann Bohnenberger, and there is nothing chaotic or unpredictable about the device. Resistant organizations endeavor to operate in much the same way, using movement to maintain orientation in spite of external forces compelling them toward inertia and institutionalization. The axes of structure, process and ideology are compelled to spin freely and in multiple directions in order to sustain an organizational form, one that resists institutionalization. We see this quite explicitly in the principles identified in the previous sections. Each of them pushes the organization to keep from becoming a static, predictable entity. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of resistant organizations is their ability to utilize movement in order to create stability, much like a gyroscope. A simple scanning of the strategies identified in the chapters above underscores this basic feature of resistant organizations. Authority is shifting, processes are unregulated, and ideologies are based on conversation and unsettled lives. Each of these adjectives emphasizes movement and the specific reason for employing each strategy is to enable the organization to resist the inertia that results from institutionalization. Indeed the whole movement is continually emerging. The gyroscope is not a perpetual motion machine as it requires energy to keep rotating. Similarly the organizations in this study derive the energy they need to continue the project of resistance from these strategies, which emphasize agency within the organization. This conceptualization of the resistant organization as a gyroscope highlights two findings in particular which should be clear from the chapters above with regard to stability and movement. First, the concept of the gyroscope requires movement between two diametrically opposed forces in order to be effective. In the field of religion, the diametrically opposing forces are often those of individuality and the collective (Sherkat and Ellison 1999). Indeed,

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many of the strategies delineated in the chapters above are focused on navigating and maintaining precisely this tension. These strategies allow the organizations in this study to avoid a simple adherence to the dominant value of individuality as expressed by mainline denominations and megachurches or its opposite, communality (the focus for many other religious groups including the Quakers (Dandelion 2004)). Both routes lead to a high degree of institutionalization. The organizations in this study made an active effort to incorporate both individuality and communality into their organizational structures, processes and ideologies. I came across this dialectical tension time and time again in my field work, and at first, I did not really know how to understand what I was seeing and hearing. There seemed, at first glance, to be competing truths. On the one hand, I would have a participant tell me that they loved the community and later another person from the same congregation would tell me that they really valued the focus on Christian spirituality that is missing in so many modern Christian churches. For example, Jessica remarked that she really appreciated “the opportunity to rediscover some of the ancient contemplative and spiritual practices that a lot of denominations have abandoned.” Later, when her husband, Wade, remarked that “community” was the single biggest reason he kept attending Calvary, she was quick to back that up. When I pushed her to reconcile this tension between individuality and community, she was adamant that “they both need to be emphasized in order for them be effective for me.” When I asked Joe why he is happiest at his current church after a lifetime spent in different denominations and congregations, he gave a similar response: Really it’s just that I learn something new, and I grow personally each week. That and the fact that I can be in community with the other people every week. There’s just a concentrated effort here to take both of those things and put them together. That combination didn’t really happen at the other places I’ve been. Usually we’d get one or the other.

Rather than attempt to reconcile these two diametrically opposed forces, I realize now that this tension is precisely wherein lies the emancipatory or resistant potential of these organizations. Not only is there no effort made to resolve these tensions, but they are, in fact, deliberately created. Wade remarked that one of the strengths of the congregation he attends is the ability of the community to help each other through life crises. He directly links this ability to dynamics of the congregations saying that “we continue to have crises in our life and if

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you’re in an environment and community that isn’t afraid of that and even creates it to some extent then you’re more equipped to handle them. Like we always say, God can handle your anger or confusion. You don’t have to understand everything.” Of course, this is not the only tension that exists and is consciously maintained, but it is certainly one of the most prominent. I offer it here as an example of the utility of the gyroscope as a metaphor for the resistant organization. Opposing forces create the horizontal movement that allows the gyroscope to maintain balance. This is precisely the same dynamic that I encountered in the field. The presence and cultivation of difference through the distinct strategies identified above allowed the organizations in this study to be relatively stable, avoiding the imbalance that is the institutionalization of one organizational form over another. Second just as the gyroscope derives its stability from movement, there is a push in resistant organizations to avoid inertia. The strategies and principles delineated above are all directed toward providing an impetus toward fostering individual action. It is this impulse toward action that keeps the resistant organization from being able to be pigeonholed as simply another type of alternative organization. The resistant organization, while highly stable and guided by specific strategies, avoids the very stasis that alternative organizations, as conceived in the academic literature, seek out. While at first glance it might appear that any alternative to the dominant organizational form would qualify as a resistant organization, this is not the case. A quick look around the organizational landscape reveals a long history of co-ops and collectives in diverse organizational fields which contradict nearly all the qualities indicative of the rational bureaucracy identified by Weber (Rothschild and Russell 1986). However, a deeper analysis reveals that the underlying logic has not shifted as collectives and co-ops are full-fledged institutions in their own right (Ferguson 1991). Although they differ from the rationalbureaucracy, it is a difference in degree not in kind (though this does not make the differences insignificant). Both types of organizations are still concerned with being predictable and efficient, but whereas one design places these two as the primary goals, the other allows for a variety of competing concerns (worker happiness, equality, etc.) to exist along with efficiency (Jackall and Levin 1984). Co-ops and collectives do not attempt to do away with efficiency and rationality, but rather, to regulate these forces so they are not advanced at the expense of other commonly held values (Martin 1990). These alternative organizations make explicit normative arguments about the efficacy and utility of one organizational

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form over another and attempt to institutionalize the set of structures, processes, and ideologies they think are best. The resistant organization makes no such claims. In fact, it resists making exactly these claims. Where both alternative organizations and dominant organizations strive for inertia by becoming so institutionalized that their composition and existence are no longer questioned, the resistant organization relies on constant movement and reevaluation of its constituent parts. There is no more telling sign of this difference, perhaps, than in the very name. Alternative organizations are conceived as a direct alternative, not to dominant organizations in general, but to the current dominant organizational form, the rational bureaucracy. Should the feminist collective organizational form rise to prominence, the term “alternative organization” would cease to have any significance. The resistant organization, by contrast, can never be rendered obsolete in this way. It resists institutionalization regardless of which particular institutionalized organizational form is exerting the pressure. The data above clearly shows that the people in the organizations in this study self-consciously avoid the utilization of a specific structure, set of processes or ideology. Thinking about the gyroscope again, we return to the concept of orientation. The gyroscope is remarkable not only because of its ability to remain in a relatively stable and fixed position, but also because of its ability to maintain its orientation relative to the surrounding environment. This is precisely the same phenomenon I both theorized and observed with regard to resistant organizations. They are not fixed commodities, and as we have seen, make no such endeavors. A fixed object has no ability to maintain an orientation relative to its environment. It can only maintain an orientation relative to itself. The difficulty of effecting organizational change in fixed “iron cage” bureaucracies is well noted by nearly every major organizational scholar from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons to Peter Selznick and Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio. Organizational mortality, in institutionalized organizations, has consistently been linked to changing environmental conditions (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Even large firms, thought to be more stable and able to absorb such threats more easily, are not immune. The rate of firm collapse, takeover, and merger have increased exponentially as the world has moved from the relatively insular environments which characterized much of the 20th century to an increasingly globalized world (Haveman 1992). This has been well-noted also in the management literature with a substantial amount of intellectual energy devoted to the development of concepts and strategies to maintain the benefits of internal focus while

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allowing the organization to change in response to altering environmental conditions (Burke 2002). The concept of loose coupling as developed by Karl Weick (1976) represents perhaps the best known attempt in this direction. It would be a mistake to think of this orientation to self which makes firms particularly susceptible to changing environmental conditions as simply a detriment, however. It is precisely this same orientation which allows institutionalized organizations, whether bureaucracies, collectives, or coops, to maintain the focus and direction needed to accomplish complex and repetitive tasks. The organizations in this study, by contrast, seek to maintain a constant orientation to their environment through resistance. As environmental forces attempt to compel the resistant organization toward institutionalization, the resistant organization is able to use the strategies identified above to maintain its relative, and desired, existence outside of or beyond the stable organizational form. Where the institutionalized organization would attempt to stay the same in a new place, Faith, for example, not only allowed their new location to change them, but intentionally invited the change. This leaves the resistant organization occupying a distinct space in the organizational landscape. Table 6.1 summarizes the differences between dominant, alternative and resistant organizations as I have presented them here. The institutionalized organization will always be the dominant form, and alternative organizations will inevitably rise to counter them, but this research makes it clear that there are some people attempting to intentionally work themselves out of this dichotomy by constructing organizations which avoid institutionalization. The point of this work has not been to argue that the resistant organizational form is the equal of the others in terms of size or scope, but rather to make clear that there is both theoretical space and empirical support for the existence of such organizations.

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Table 6.1 Organizational Forms

Example

Structure

Professionalization

Domain / Integration

Dominant

Alternative

Resistant

Megachurch, Denominations

House Church, Church within a Church

Emerging Church

The dominant institutionalized structure is the rational bureaucracy characterized by a high divis-ion of labor, established rules and proc-edures, and official positions separated by a clear hierarchy.

The alternative organization is flat and consists of rotating leadership along with a consensus or democratic decision making process. While they represent an alternative to the dominant form, they are just as institutionalized .

Resistant organizations emphasize a shifting base of authority, intentionally uninstitutionalized decision making procedures and labor organized according to ability and willingness.

Rational bureaucracies employ full-time profess-ionals with specialized training and credentials.

Alternative organizations utilize part-time and volunteer labor as well as full-time workers. Specialized training is valued on an as needed basis.

Professionals in resistant organizations are typically part-time or volunteer and experience is emphasized over training and credentials.

Dominant organizations are usually secularized and have wide license to operate in most spheres of society and are restricted by ideology. They typically retain full or high control over all organi-zational activities.

Alternative organizations are insular, seeking likeminded groups to partner with. While they retain full control over internal workings, they are willing to cede some power to outside organizations for external activities.

In resistant organizations members intentionally seek opportunities to cede control. In these organizations there is a recognition of the interconnectedne ss of all spheres of life and barriers to participation are removed as much as possible.

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Contributions

The research presented here opens up a new avenue of exploration for organizational theorists. While the identification of the resistant organization is a unique contribution to the field of organizational studies and the insights generated in the course of this study advance our understanding of religious organizations in particular, these findings do not suggest that a wholesale shift in organizational theory is in order. Indeed, one of the particular strengths of this study has been the application of existing concepts developed by institutional and organizational scholars to a new phenomenon. This not only helps to substantiate the current findings, but makes future comparisons between resistant organizations and institutionalized organizations much easier. As the principles of the extended case method dictate, this study has resulted in a refinement of existing organizational theory rather than a complete reinvention or reinterpretation of institutional and organizational theory. In a simplified version, institutional theory claims that all organizations will eventually become institutionalized or die out, but this way of characterizing the theory loses much of the power of institutional theory. Every organization will eventually perish as well, but what matters is not just the result but also the process. The utility of institutional theory is that it tells us something about how that process is likely to occur. Similarly, the utility of these findings lie in suggesting how these forces might likely be resisted. Of course, only time will tell if these congregations are able to maintain their resistant orientation for their entire lifespan, but there is obviously reason to believe that people can and do actively work against the forces of institutionalization with some degree of success. It is possible that this research simply captures these organizations in an early stage, before isomorphism has set in, and I certainly want to be cautious in overselling these findings, but it is reasonable to point out that there are things people are doing that are working. Rather than trying to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and claim that an organization is or is not resistant as a status, this research sheds light on the process and strategies that people implement on an ongoing basis to avoid institutionalization. This, of course, is very important to sociologists as it is these processes which make up much of the day to day existence of the people within organizations. The fact that the people in this study and, I would argue, in the Emerging Church as a whole, decide to devote a significant amount of energy toward creating and maintaining these strategies

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intended to limit institutionalization is important to understanding not only this particular group but also for gaining some insight into the kinds of activities which likely make up all kinds of potentially similar organizations that have gone largely unexamined by organizational scholars. For example, a cursory examination of the literature surrounding the Falun Gong in China (Tong 2002) and the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain (Whyte and Whyte 1991) as well as many new social movements (Pichardo 1997) suggests that there might be much to learn about organizational resistance to institutionalization by reconceptualizing some of the activities in these organizations. As such, this work does not pretend to offer a final theory of organizational resistance, but rather the beginnings of how we might usefully conceptualize such activities within organizations when we do find them. Rather than relegate them to outlier status or attribute them to the residue of a younger and more idealistic organization, we should assess them as we would any other organizational practice. That is, we should look for the rules and conditions which guide these behaviors and, where possible, to link them to larger social forces. I have endeavored to that here by displaying the strategies that were made clear in my investigation of the Emerging Church as a religious phenomenon responding directly to the perceived over corporatization of traditional organized religion as symbolized by the megachurch. Future research should determine the necessary and sufficient conditions that cause organizations to behave in this way. The case of the Emerging Church as described here is rooted in a specific period of history which led to a general mistrust of institutional authority, but there is no reason to suggest that these are the only circumstances that could lead to organizations implementing similar strategies. I have focused my attention on the field of religion, but experts in other fields would do well to examine their own organizations in order to draw out any commonalities of condition that must be present. Perhaps one of the most compelling avenues opened up by the research here is the partnership between institutionalized organizations and resistant organizations as exemplified by the two congregations that existed as an outreach of a traditional, denominationally affiliated congregation. The Emerging Church sponsored by these parent churches allows the denomination to reach more and different people than they could otherwise attract within their traditional structure, and the strategic use of resources allows the Emerging congregation to stay afloat financially. Firms looking for ways to branch out, facilitate innovation

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or attract new markets should pay attention to the lessons of these congregations in particular. Conclusion

Returning to the scenario posed in the preface of the book, we are in a much better position to offer help and guidance to people like the group Mary and Mark are a part of. They were concerned specifically with offering some kind of training for leaders in the Emerging Church without institutionalizing a “right” practice or course of study. The research presented here has offered a general conceptual framework for how institutionalization might be resisted in the most important and vulnerable organizational components. Specifically, I have shown that an organization which truly resists institutionalization is not one which seeks to create its own patterns, but one which seeks to make the patterns themselves subject to constant criticism and interrogation. In the end, I return to Demerath’s notion that “churches require a modicum of unquestioning loyalty, unswerving commitment, and unstinting support” (Demerath 1995:460). The pages here indicate that this is not completely accurate. At least in the case of the Emerging Church, a modification is necessary. The congregations in this study do not object to loyalty, commitment and support, but rather the modifiers of “unquestioning,” “unswerving,” and “unstinting” that Demerath sees as playing such a fundamental role in most religious organizations. We know now that there are strategies an organization can pursue in the areas of authority, labor, governance, professionalism, and ideology which can result in success through the creation of a niche market because of their resistance to forces compelling conformity. The result is precisely what Mary and Damian’s group was working for, without understanding how to get there, namely an increase in the range of opportunities for personal religious expression and discovery within the same organization. They were right to be concerned about the constraining powers of institutionalization, and this study has offered the beginnings of a theory for how those forces might be effectively resisted. 1 Although the text has focused on the things people in the Emerging Church do which make them distinctive, one should not get the impression that the Emerging Church is a wholly unique kind of organization. As I point out in chapter 1, the Emerging Church simply offers a good opportunity to begin thinking about organizations of this kind through an examination of the dynamics of this particular movement.

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2

Choosing one institutionalized model over another is not resistance. In other words, a feminist organization is not resistant simply because it opposes capitalism and uses a structure which is anti-hierarchical. Indeed as ample scholarship has shown, feminist organizations are just as institutionalized as capitalist organizations albeit around a different set of values and criteria (Ferree and Martin 1995; Martin 1990; Riger 1994).

Appendix A Research Method and Design

Organizational scholars have typically employed a fairly standardized methodological approach which is expressive in nature. These studies seek to explain some particular relationship or aspect of an organization in order to draw some conclusions about broader social phenomenon (e.g., gender and power relations, capital flow, information technology, management/labor relationships, etc.). In other words, organizations are used as a setting within which we draw sociological conclusions. Michael Burawoy et al. note that the new institutionalists, “have little to say…about the link between models and norms on the one side and concrete practices on the other…they leave ethnographers, who work from the ground upward, without theoretical tools to delve into the connections between micro practices and macro structures” (Burawoy et al. 2000:3). It is this link between the micro and the macro which plagues organizational studies in general. While the new institutionalists have made significant strides toward overcoming this divide, the field is still limited by an expressive, rather than an explicitly contextualstructural, methodological approach when it comes to organizational ethnographies. 1 Fortunately, Burawoy offers a solution as well as a critique. In this appendix, I argue that Burowoy’s (1991, 1998a) extended case method can be applied to organizational studies to help overcome the problems highlighted above. Additionally, I suggest a slight modification of this methodology which opens up new areas of inquiry for the extended case method. Finally, I detail my technique for data analysis and provide a description of the individual congregations I visited and my time in the field. In this study I used the principles of the extended case method (Burawoy 1991, 1998a) to help guide my data collection and analysis. The extended case method decrees that an investigator enter the field with knowledge of existing theories and seeks to replicate those theories 171

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through daily interaction. The extended case method is particularly good at uncovering and making sense of anomalous cases which are not explained by existing theory (Babbie 2001; Burawoy 1991, 1998a). There is a need for a method which explains these organizational practices as so much scholarship in the past 25 years has been conducted in the long shadow cast by neoinstitutional theory which focuses almost exclusively on homogeneity. Such a perspective misses, however, those organizational forms and practices which explicitly resist homogenization. The extended case method is well suited to remedying this oversight. Background of Method

The extended case method stands in stark opposition to more positivist research methods. In qualitative methodology this means that the principles which underlie the extended case method are disconsonant with what Burawoy (1998b) calls a “reflexive “ social science. Positive methodologies, qualitative or quantitative seek to control for context. Burawoy draws on Katz (1983) to argue that these methods are aimed at producing an objective research procedure or process by regulating the reactivity, reliability, replicability, and representativeness. Reactivity refers to the effect of the researcher on the research setting and should be minimized. Reliability is achieved through the use of a “consistent set of criteria for the selection of data” (Burawoy 1998a:12). This should be done in a clear and coherent way, and one should be able to guarantee that the sample is indicative of the population so results will be both replicable and representative. Positive methodologies flourish in, and to some extent create, research settings which are, or at least appear to be, homogenous. Just as the quintessential positive research method, surveys, restrict the range of possible answers and questions, the dominant qualitative method in this vein, grounded theory, compels researchers to continually look for similarities in the data. Burawoy writes that “it works best in a reified world that homogenizes all experience…Positive science realizes itself when we are powerless to resist wider systems” (Burawoy 1998a:30). More accurately, and perhaps less bombastically, positive methods have a way of rendering potentially non-homogenous or resistant activities as irrelevant with the designation of outlier status. This is not to say that positive methods cannot be used to study resistance, but rather to argue that positive principles are inherently less concerned with those cases which do not fit the norm for the research question being posed. Even those, primarily qualitative methods, which compel

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researchers to utilize the anamolous case do so primarily as a way of understanding dominant behavior patterns. Thus, resistance can be studied effectively because it can be classified and typologized. Variation, however, presents an entirely different problem. The extended case method is built, then, to deal especially with variation. Researchers using reflexive methods do this by exploring and exploiting contextually specific elements. The method “takes context and situation as its points of departure” in order to discover the variation present in the local worlds of participants (Burawoy 1998a:30). Burawoy posits three simultaneous “dialogues” that must take place in order for reflexive sociology to generate useful empirical information: between observer and participants, between local processes and extralocal forces, and between theory and itself (Burawoy 1998b:5). These dialogues may be virtual, that is, constructed, or real and take place throughout the research process. They form the basis of the central tenets of reflexive social science and the extended case method: intervention, process, structuration and reconstruction. Intervention refers simply to making a virtue out of the intervention of the researcher into the participant’s life instead of trying to minimize the unavoidable impact of taking the participant out of his/her normal context. When an intervention occurs (e.g., in an interview or participant observation) an effort should be made to understand how the respondent understands the processes being interrogated during the intervention, to “prioritize the social situation over the individual” (Burawoy 1998a:16). Burawoy takes pains to point out that reflexive science is not aimed at simply comprehending a situation or displaying the range of narrative present in a local context. Reflexive researchers are just as concerned with uncovering social processes and categories. This involves a reduction of these narratives by gathering multiple interpretations of the same case and transforming “situational knowledge into social processes” (Burawoy 1998a:15. Stucturation refers simply to making an effort to understand and account for, rather than control, how the local environment shapes and is shaped by extralocal forces. Reconstruction is dealt with more fully in the next section, and involves seeking out information which will confirm existing theory and thereby make the findings generalizable. Individual cases provide an interpretive challenge for existing theory which is refined and extended when it is unable to adequately explain the observed situation (Besecke 2001). This is no small task as the best reconstruction efforts are those which “leave core postulates intact, that do as well as the preexisting theory upon which they are built, and that absorb anomalies with parsimony, offering novel angles of vision”

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(Burawoy 1998a:16). There is a recognition that meeting all of these criteria for reconstruction are rarely possible but that this goal should be at the heart of reflexive science as exemplified by the extended case method. Throughout the collection, analysis and presentation of the data in this book I have endeavored to be as true to the principles of reflexive science and the extended case method as possible. In the course of gathering my data I was upfront and explicit about the nature of the research project. I designed the interview and observation guide to be just that, a guide. Thus, I make no claims to have understood the research setting apart from my own existence in it. The information gathered is highly contextual as I walked, both figuratively and literally, through daily routines and religious rituals with my respondents seeking their explanations on any artifact, structure or process that either appeared useful or important, and many that ultimately, were not. This contextual specificity is important for establishing the variation and intentionality necessary for constructing a theory of organizational resistance. It would be beyond the realm of realistic possibility to expect my respondents to be aware of the academic theories discussed in this text, but that should not suggest that they are not savvy enough to understand how to resist something as complex as institutionalization. Guided by the principles above, I set out to reconstruct and confirm theories of isomorphism and institutionalization. My inquiries were thus focused on the mundane, everyday events that are not often the subject of much concentrated thought. In order to sustain existing theory, my inquiries into organizational structures, processes and ideologies should have resulted in a struggle to explain the why the organization operated in particular ways, reflecting a high degree of internalization and institutionalization. Instead, I received a variety of narratives or “situational knowledges” that were mobilized quickly and fully. These narratives are presented in the text as a set of processes or strategies which maintains and reflects the variation I found in the field, while extracting the processes. Indeed the processes themselves are built on variation. Finally, I have made a concentrated effort to integrate the narratives of my respondents with those in the popular and academic literature regarding the relevant religious and social forces at work in the history of the Emerging Church in order to comprehend how my respondent’s efforts to create a satisfactory religious experience both shape and are shaped by the current religious landscape.

Appendix A

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Generalizability

The extended case method helps bridge the gap in generalizability which plagues the single case studies of so much of the organizational literature. Burawoy writes that “the extended case method applies reflexive science to ethnography in order to extract the general from the unique, to move from the “micro” to the “macro,” and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the future, all by building on preexisting theory” (Burawoy 1998a:5). The process of building to the macro from the micro occurs by searching “for theories that highlight some aspect of the situation under study as being anomalous and then proceeding to rebuild (rather than reject) that theory by reference to the wider forces at work, be they the state, the economy, or even the world system” (Burawoy 1991:6). A study’s generalizability lies in its refinement of theories that are already “out there.” The extended case method dictates that researchers enter the field with extensive knowledge of existing theories which should be, but are not, able to explain the case at hand. In this instance, existing institutional theory, old and new, fails to explain those organizational forms which explicitly reject isomorphic forces while still seeking growth and legitimacy. As I note above the key is not that the macro is seen in or explains the micro or that the micro is an expression of macro forces, but rather that every micro interaction in structured by macro forces. In my case, it is not that I turn to the Emerging Church and find evidence of consumerism or ecumenicalism or secularization. Instead, I turn to the Emerging Church and its particular history in order to refine a particular theory, in this case institutionalism, that should but does not account for the reality of the situation. This theory gets refined not simply through the explanation of the anomalous case, but through the explanation of that anomalous case as occurring in a particular way because of the macro-level forces which shape it. In the U.S., the Emerging Church is seen as a direct response to the failure of the megachurch movement which initially promised to make church more relevant and local, but instead resulted in the (re)creation of highly centralized, rigidly structured religious organizations which simply replaced the denominations with a more localized version of the same structure. Sampling

The issue of sampling in this project must be taken up on two levels. First, a method was needed for justifying the inclusion of any particular congregation. It is not feasible or even possible to sample every

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Emerging Church in the U.S., in part due to the definitional problems identified above. Thus, rather than trying to sample for representation, I have collected a purposeful sample. A purposeful sample requires two, mutually reinforcing assumptions (Creswell 2002). First, in contrast to the grounded theory method, the researcher must have an extensive understanding of the theory he/she wishes to explore. Second, the sample can be determined only after the researcher has made several visits to the research setting, when “the researcher will know who to sample for the purpose of the study” (Coyne 1997:624). Each of these assumptions is consonant with the general requirements for the extended case method described above.. I chose particular congregations because of theoretical reasoning in the organizations and religion literature suggesting that particular characteristics are especially salient for religious organizations. McAdam and Paulsen (1993) argue that in the absence of a control group or experimental set-up, careful theoretical reasoning can help to mitigate the danger of sampling on the control group. In particular, congregational size, affiliation, and worship style are variables that help to determine the unique character of a religious organization (Chaves et al. 1999), while longevity and organizational size are important determinants of institutionalization (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Second, I needed a way to identify particular respondents within these congregations. Of the numerous purposeful sampling options available, I used chain referral or snowball sampling in order to identify potential congregations and congregants with the characteristics identified above. I chose this strategy in order to deal with the amorphous boundaries of the Emerging Church (Miles and Huberman 1994:28). 1 In particular I think of DiMaggio and Anheier’s (1990) work about nonprofits which links the current structure of non-profits to large scale social forces at work a century ago.

Appendix B Interview Guide

[First, I need to administer the informed consent form and answer any questions. During this process I need to emphasize that A. The interviewee may stop the interview at anytime and B. The interviewee may refuse to answer any question. Also, I need to restate that this interview is confidential and that no information from it will be accompanied by the interviewee’s name or other identifying information.] ******************** [I will begin by letting the participant know how I obtained his/her name and who referred him/her to me. Okay, I would like to start by gathering some general information about your background and your family. ******************** Where were you born and raised? Did you have any brothers or sisters? Are you currently married or cohabitating? Does your partner attend church with you? If not, does s/he attend church someplace else? If yes, did ya’ll make the decision to attend an Emerging congregation together? Do you have any kids? Do you take them to church with you? How many places have lived in your life? Is your family currently active in the church? How would you characterize yourself politically? Did you go to college? If so, where? What do you do for a living? How long have you had that position? Have you ever worked in any other fields? If so, which ones? ******************* Briefly, I’d like to now ask you about how you use your free time. ******************* 177

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How many hours per week do you spend online? What websites do you visit most frequently? Do you visit internet sites related to Emerging Church? If Yes, Which sites do you visit? How often? Do you maintain any websites or blogs? Do you belong to any online discussion groups or subscribe to any listserves? What are your hobbies? How often do you spend time with people from your congregation outside of church? In the past year, have you purchased any books or movies that are theological in nature? If yes: which ones and why? ***************** Alright, Thank you. I’d like to ask you now about your history with the church. ***************** What church tradition, if any, did you grow up in? If yes: What made you decide to start attending an Emerging church? Tell me a little about your church experiences growing up, did your family attend church regularly? Did you? Were you a part of a youth group? If yes: Tell me about your youth group. How old were you when you were participating? What kinds of things did your youth group do? Did you enjoy these early church experiences? After you left home did you continue to attend church regularly? Did you participate in congregational activities outside of church? If you hadn’t started attending an Emerging church, would you be worshipping at a different congregation? If yes, which one? Why did you choose the Emerging Church over the [insert church name here]. How often do you attend church currently? Days per week? Hours per visit? What activities do you participate in when you are there? Have you had a “conversion” experience? If yes: Can you tell me about it? There is much discussion within the the Emerging Church community about whether or not the Emerging Church is ready to be a “movement.” Are you aware of these discussions? What are your thoughts?

Appendix B

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********** Good, thanks. Now I’d like to discuss the Emerging Church in general and your congregation in particular. (This section is only for people who self-identify as part of the Emerging Church or as belonging to or attending an Emerging Church.) ********** Why do you attend an Emerging Church? What does it mean to be in the Emerging Church? What makes your church an Emerging Church? How would I know if a congregation was “Emerging” if nobody told me? How did you come to attend an Emerging Church? [Or, for those who were apart of congregations that “emerged,” Why did your congregation decide to become part of the Emerging Church, and why do you still attend?] How do decisions get made in your congregation? How is this congregation different or not different from other churches you’ve attended in the past? How does being a member of an Emerging Church congregation affect your life outside of worship services? Tell me about your worship services? Who plans them? Who gets to speak or lead the service? Who are the leaders in your congregation? Who are the leaders of the Emerging Church? Finally, do you know of anyone else that would be interested in speaking with me about the Emerging Church? ********** Questions for leaders or people in traditional leadership positions. ********** How do your administrative tasks differ from those of people in similar positions in other religious organizations with which you are familiar? What organizations or groups do you interact with in your job (i.e, local, state, federal government)? Do these organizations ever cause conflict within your congregation? How does your congregation make decisions? What is your role in your congregation? Where were you trained? How did you come to this position? What does it mean to be a part of the Emerging Church?

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In your opinion, what is the worst thing that is likely to happen to the Emerging Church? Where do you see the Emerging Church in the next 15 years? Which group of people does your congregation typically attract? Do you think this is consistent with other Emerging churches? How do you go about targeting and attracting those people? Have you noticed that they have anything in common in terms of demographics or life histories? What other groups or organizations, if any, past or present to you look to for inspiration? Tell me about how you came to know about those groups and why you use them as models. How have you had to adapt or change those models to work in your congregation? Are there other organizations or groups, religious or otherwise, that you want to avoid becoming? If so, why? ************* Finally, there are a set of questions that I’ll want to ask the opponents of and commentators on the Emerging Church. During these interviews, I’ll draw on the above questions as is necessary, but due to the diverse nature of this group it is impossible to identify them ahead of time. ************** What does it mean to be the Emerging Church? What about the Emerging Church do you find problematic? What are the good things about the Emerging Church? Why, in your opinion, has the Emerging Church become so popular with a portion of the population? Do you see the Emerging Church as taking members away from already established congregations? Is there anything about the Emerging Church that you or your congregation has adopted? How has the Emerging Church influenced Christianity both in the U.S. and around the world?

Appendix C Emerging Church Texts

The following is a list of texts that were referenced frequently during the course of my interviews. The list is provided not as a way of trying to canonize some texts, but rather as a way to help give context to the conversations underpinning people’s experiences when I talked with them. If the research were carried out now the list would be different. Carson, D. A. 2005. Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Frost, Michael and Alan Hirsch. 2003. The Shaping of Things to Come. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Gibbs, Eddie, and Ryan K. Bolger. 2005. Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Jamieson, Alan. 2002. A Churchless Faith. London: SPCK. Jones, Tony. 2001. Postmodern Youth Ministry. El Cajon, CA: Youth Specialties. Kimball, Dan. 2003. The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Kimball, Dan. 2004. Emerging Worship. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. McLaren, Brian. 2001. A New Kind of Christian. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. —. 2006. A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative,Fundamentalist/Calvinist,Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Myers, Joseph. 2003. The Search to Belon: Rethinking Intimacy, Community and Small Groups. El Cajon, CA: Emergent YS. Pagitt, William. 2005. Church Re-Imagined: The Spiritual Formation of People in Communities of Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Simson, Wolfgang. 2001. Houses that Changed the World: The Return of House Churches. Waynesboro, GA: Authentic. Tomlinson, Dave. 2003. The Post-Evangelical. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Webber, Robert (Ed.). 2007. Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. —. 1999. Ancient-Future Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. 181

Appendix D The Anti-Statement of Faith

Doctrinal Statement(?)1

From Tony Jones, National Coordinator, Emergent-U.S. Yes, we have been inundated with requests for our statement of faith in Emergent, but some of us had an inclination that to formulate something would take us down a road that we don't want to trod. So, imagine our joy when a leading theologian joined our ranks and said that such a statement would be disastrous. That's what happened when we started talking to LeRon Shults, late of Bethel Seminary and now heading off to a university post in Norway. LeRon is the author of many books, all of which you should read, and now the author a piece to guide us regarding statements of faith and doctrine. Read on... From LeRon Shults: The coordinators of Emergent have often been asked (usually by their critics) to proffer a doctrinal statement that lays out clearly what they believe. I am merely a participant in the conversation who delights in the ongoing reformation that occurs as we bring the Gospel into engagement with culture in ever new ways. But I have been asked to respond to this ongoing demand for clarity and closure. I believe there are several reasons why Emergent should not have a "statement of faith" to which its members are asked (or required) to subscribe. Such a move would be unnecessary, inappropriate and disastrous. Why is such a move unnecessary? Jesus did not have a "statement of faith." He called others into faithful relation to God through life in the Spirit. As with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he was not concerned primarily with whether individuals gave cognitive assent to abstract propositions but with calling persons into trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness. The writers of the 183

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New Testament were not obsessed with finding a final set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers. Paul, Luke and John all talked much more about the mission to which we should commit ourselves than they did about the propositions to which we should assent. The very idea of a "statement of faith" is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties – and this brings us to the next point. Such a move would be inappropriate. Various communities throughout church history have often developed new creeds and confessions in order to express the Gospel in their cultural context, but the early modern use of linguistic formulations as "statements" that allegedly capture the truth about God with certainty for all cultures and contexts is deeply problematic for at least two reasons. First, such an approach presupposes a (Platonic or Cartesian) representationalist view of language, which has been undermined in late modernity by a variety of disciplines across the social and physical sciences (e.g., sociolinguistics and paleo-biology). Why would Emergent want to force the new wine of the Spirit’s powerful transformation of communities into old modernist wineskins? Second, and more importantly from a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry. Why would it be disastrous? Emergent aims to facilitate a conversation among persons committed to living out faithfully the call to participate in the reconciling mission of the biblical God. Whether it appears in the by-laws of a congregation or in the catalog of an educational institution, a "statement of faith" tends to stop conversation. Such statements can also easily become tools for manipulating or excluding people from the community. Too often they create an environment in which real conversation is avoided out of fear that critical reflection on one or more of the sacred propositions will lead to excommunication from the community. Emergent seeks to provide a milieu in which others are welcomed to join in the pursuit of life "in" the One who is true (1 John 5:20). Giving into the pressure to petrify the conversation in a "statement" would make Emergent easier to control; its critics could dissect it and then place it in a theological museum

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alongside other dead conceptual specimens the curators find opprobrious. But living, moving things do not belong in museums. Whatever else Emergent may be, it is a movement committed to encouraging the lively pursuit of God and to inviting others into a delightfully terrifying conversation along the way. This does not mean, as some critics will assume, that Emergent does not care about belief or that there is no role at all for propositions. Any good conversation includes propositions, but they should serve the process of inquiry rather than shut it down. Emergent is dynamic rather than static, which means that its ongoing intentionality is (and may it ever be) shaped less by an anxiety about finalizing state-ments than it is by an eager attention to the dynamism of the Spirit’s disturbing and comforting presence, which is always reforming us by calling us into an ever-intensifying participation in the Son’s welcoming of others into the faithful embrace of God. 1 Retrieved from http://emergent-us.typepad.com/emergentus/2006/05/ doctrinal_state.html on March 19, 2012. Originally posted on March 04, 2006.

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Index

Alternative organizations, 13, 33, 39, 42,44,136, 147-148, 154, 163-166 Ancient-future, 8, 55 Anti-institutional, 5, 16, 30, 41, 59, 70, 123, 137, 140, 142 Anti-Statement of Faith, 77-79 Atomistic ideology, 64-66 Authentic, 44, 73, 87, 94, 120, 149 Authority, 7, 12, 16, 47, 54-57, 75, 80, 85-93, 100, 111-120, 161

Consumerism, 10, 34, 37-38, 42, 5455, 146, 154 Conversation, 7, 12, 30, 47-51, 6988, 159 Credentials, 7, 36, 48, 85-86, 91-94, 101-108, 134-138 Creeds, 22 (table), 27, 63, 65, 76-81, 183-185 Dechurched, 8, 40-41, 49-52, 138, 140 See also, Disaffiliated Chrisitans Decision making, 6, 13, 23, 50-51, 88, 95-102, 117-120 Decoupling, 91, 113, 153-157 Defiant organizations, 147 Demerath III, Neil, 2, 65, 169 Democracy, 13, 42, 88-89, 96-98, 117, 152 Dialogue, 69-76, 119-120, 173 DiMaggio, Paul, 3-4, 17, 123-124, 146, 153-154 Disaffiliated Christians, 49-53, 83 Disruption, 152-153 DIY, 131-135, 138, 140 Drucker, Peter, 39

Bader-Saye, Scott, 8, 14, 16, 44-46, 56 Bielo, James, 5, 7-8, 12, 17, 26, 28, 43, 47, 55, 74 Blog, 6, 10-12, 17, 54-55, 70 Both/and, 6, 13, 16, 162-164 Burawoy, Michael, 17, 171-174 Bureaucracy, 7, 13, 33, 36, 44, 93, 99, 111, 154, 163-166 Bureaucratic, see Bureacracy Calling, 86, 101, 108-110, 166-169 Case descriptions, 20-28 CEO, 10, 13, 58, 100 Chang, Patricia, 3, 101, 148 Chaos, 90, 160 Children, 9, 80, 83, 87, 131, 140-141 Chrisitian culture industry, 66 Church-within-a-church, 24(n5), 31, 40, 45-46 Community, 23-27, 42-43, 48, 52, 55, 97-98, 102-107, 162-163 Congregational descriptions, 20; Crossroads, 20-21; Faith, 23-24; Calvary, 24-25; Fellowship, 25; Incarnate Word, 26-27; Living Word, 27-28 Congregational growth, 13, 23, 2829, 38-39, 42, 96-98, 124-131, 146

ECM. See Extended Case Method Efficiency, 49, 53, 123, 134, 147150, 154, 160-163 Emergent Village, 9, 76-78, 129 Emerging Church movement: description of, 6-10, 61-62; size, 9; stereotypes, 10-11; criticisms, 11-12, 83; organziational form, 13; ideology,16-17, 81-84; popular press accounts, 16-17; as response to megachurch 40-41 Evangelical pragmatism, 44-47 Evangelical, 16, 38-39, 43-47, 124, 135

197

198

Index

Extended Case Method, 17-18, 171176 Falun Gong, 168 Feedback loops, 98-100, 139 Feminist organizations, 13, 148, 164, 169(n2) Fundamentalism, 8-9, 16, 47 Generalizability, 145, 173, 175 Gyroscope, 160-166 Hierarchy, see Bureaucracy Holistic ideology, 81-84 Homogenization, 17, 33, 40, 124, 151, 172 See also Isomorphism House church, 13, 24, 40-44, 130-131 Hybels, Bill, 37, 39 Hyperlocal, 33-35, 125 Ideology, 1-5, 13, 43, 46-46, 62-82, 120-124, 136-140, 155-164 Inclusive, 52, 78, 141, 148, 150-152, 157-160 Institutional logic, 53, 63-64, 65, 82, 129 Institutionalization, 1-6, 33-35, 6367, 80-82, 107-109, 115-116, 123, 145-155, 161-169 Intentionality, 28-31, 41, 47 49, 6263, 74, 82, 127-129, 146-160 Internet, 54-55 Iron cage, 5, 123, 146, 160, 164 Isomorphism, 4, 39, 49, 53, 96, 124, 137, 146, 151-154, 167, 174 Isreali kibbutzim, 148

Megachurch, 7, 8, 33-34, 44-47; development of, 35-40 Membership, 7-9, 23, 27, 42, 51, 92, 158-160 Messiness, 129-131 Mission statements, see Creeds Missional, 42-44, 124-125, 142 Modernity, 39, 55-56, 184 Mondragon, 148, 168 Niche Market, 135-142, 158, 169 Oliver, Christine, 4-5, 146-148 Organizational field, 5, 33, 124, 148 Organizational ideology, 43, 63-64 81-82; and religion 64-66, 140 Organizational imprinting, 35 Organizational longevity, 24 Organizational size, 20 Organizational survival, 4, 123, 135137, 142, 164 Organizational theory and religion, 36 Politics, 8, 16, 38-39, 57 Postmodernity, 54-58 Powell, Walter, 4, 17, 123-124, 146, 153-154 Prestige, 86, 91-94 Pro-Am, 134, 136 Professionals, 85-87; seminary, 8687, 101, 103-106; ordination,104, 110; training 106-108, conflict, 117-118 Public distrust 57-59 Purpose Driven Church, 28, 39, 90

Jepperson, Ronald, 151-152 Jones, Tony, 9, 129-131

Quakers, 7, 42, 148, 162 Questioning, 30, 67-77, 129, 169

Labor structure 91-98, 111-116 Leadbetter, Charles, 134 Legitimacy, 13-14, 25, 53, 69-71, 81, 86, 129, 150-156, 175 Liturgy, see Worship services Loose coupling, 7, 165 Luther, Martin, 47

Rational choice theory, 3, 50-51, 53, 59n2 Reformation, 1, 47 Religious affiliation, 25, 138-140 Religious capital, 105-106 Resistance, 2-6, 26-28, 30-31, 54, 8889, 120, 136-137, 145-165 Resistant organization, 3, 146-149; and examples, 148; principles of 149-165; 166 (table)

McLaren, Brian, 16 McLuhan, Marshall, 34

Index 199

Revival, 38, 45 Rituals, 37, 41, 44, 46-47, 64-67, 74, 79-82, 89, 105-106, 139, 151-152 Routinization, 24, 86-87, 90-92, 104, 109 Sacred-profane, 11, 42, 45, 64-65 Sampling, 175-176 Scott, Walter, 35, 107, 147-148, 150, 154-155 Seeker, 7, 29, 37, 40, 47 Social capital, 105-106 Standard operating procedures, 59, 87, 115, 151 Statements of faith, see Creeds Structuration, 149, 173 Sustainability, 83, 118, 140-141, 149, 158 Swidler, Ann, 30, 62, 66-67, 83 Symbolic consciousness, 80-81 Theology, 5, 11, 39-43, 48, 52, 159; systematic, 47; and messiness 129-130 Truth, 56, 63-65, 76, 82 Unchurched, 8, 37, 41, 45 Unsettled lives, 30, 61-63, 66-67, 74, 83, 161 Warren, Rick, 28, 37, 39 Willow Creek, 37, 39 Worship services, 14-15 (table) , 4547, 89-94, 103-104, 115; and creative worship 114

About the Book

If a church resists rules, rituals, and dogma, what holds it together? Josh Packard explores the inner workings of the Emerging Church, revealing how a movement that rejects organizational trappings and embraces a do-it-yourself ethic has managed to create a distinctive place for itself at the margins of mainstream Christianity. Packard demystifies the beliefs and operations of the loosely connected Emerging Church congregations that developed in direct response to the heavily bureaucratic megachurches. While acknowledging the challenges inherent in sustaining such a movement, he shows that the church succeeds not despite its anti-institutional approach, but because of it. His work offers new insights into the interplay of culture, organizations, and doctrine in today’s religious landscape. Josh Packard is assistant professor of sociology at Midwestern State University.

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